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PRESIDENT BIDEN SHOULD PARDON ETHEL ROSENBERG  
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Phillip Deery
January 2, 2025
The Nation
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_ A newly released classified document shows that the National
Security Agency knew Ethel Rosenberg was not a spy—and that the
government executed her anyway. _

Mugshots of Ethel Rosenberg in 1951, the year of her conviction
alongside her husband, Julius, for passing atomic secrets to the
Soviets. (Hulton Archive // The Nation),

 

Seventy-five years ago, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested and
charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. During their trial the
following year in 1951, presiding judge Irving Kauffman termed their
actions 
[[link removed]]in
passing secrets to the Soviet Union “worse than murder.” Despite a
worldwide campaign for clemency, the Rosenbergs were executed in Sing
Sing prison in 1953. American society was deeply fractured between
detractors who believed that their treason constituted—in the words
of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—the “crime of the century,” and
supporters convinced that they were innocent victims of Cold War
hysteria. Since 1953, the Rosenberg case continued to haunt a
generation of Americans, and passionate arguments over their guilt or
innocence persisted.

The “Venona” cables, declassified and released in 1995,
highlighted Julius’s role. The Venona project
[[link removed]] intercepted
and translated top-secret coded messages between Moscow and its
overseas KGB stations. The cables revealed that Julius led a spy ring
in New York in the 1940s. But there is now a new and important piece
of evidence: a previously classified document released in August 2024
by the National Security Agency (NSA). Dated August 22, 1950, it is
a memorandum
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senior codebreaker on the Venona project, Meredith Gardner
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who concluded that Ethel was _not_ a spy.

Historians and commentators have remained polarized over Ethel’s
culpability. For Emory University historian Harvey Klehr, whose
2021 essay
[[link removed]] “The
Eternal Return of Ethel Rosenberg” asks, “How has the myth of her
innocence become so untethered from the evidence of her guilt?,” the
case is closed: Ethel was rightly convicted—even if wrongly
executed—and her defenders refuse to face the facts. Klehr agreed
with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research director, Jonathan Brent,
who argued
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“the myth [of Ethel’s innocence] is not dependent on evidence, the
myth is a matter of belief, which transcends evidence.… evidence
doesn’t matter to those people who are true believers.” But
evidence does matter to me. And the evidence points to Ethel’s
innocence.

There are only two deciphered mentions of Ethel in the Venona cables.
The first is a September 21, 1944, cable
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the New York KGB station stating that “Liberal [Rosenberg] and his
wife recommended her [Ruth Greenglass, Ethel’s sister-in-law] as an
intelligent and clever girl,” whose apartment could be used as a
safe house. The second is a November 27, 1944, cable
[[link removed]] profiling
Ethel—significantly, she was identified by name and never assigned a
codename, although codenames were customary for both sources and
agents—that stated: “Knows about her husband’s work” (where
“work” clearly implied espionage) but added, “In view of her
delicate health does not work.” This was shared with the FBI in
1948. Ethel, in short, was certainly aware of Julius’s activities
and possibly shared a recommendation, but the Venona cables confirm
that, at most, she was peripheral to his spy ring.

The significance of Gardner’s 1950 memorandum is that it further
exculpates Ethel from active engagement in undercover activity. With
most of the Venona decryptions completed in 1948–49, the memorandum
assessed what the decrypts meant. Given Gardner’s pivotal role in
the project, his opinion was authoritative. His memo reviewed findings
about the Rosenberg network under the heading “Atomic Espionage Spy
Ring.” In Section 5, he validated the veracity of the November 1944
cable. He noted that “Mrs Rosenberg was a party member, a devoted
wife, and that she knew about her husband’s work, but that due to
ill health she did not engage in the work herself.” It is clear what
Gardner meant here by “the work”: involvement in Julius’s
espionage.

Gardner wrote his memorandum 11 days _after_ Ethel was arrested.
Because he liaised closely with the FBI, and because of the
significance of the case, it seems almost certain that J. Edgar Hoover
would have been apprised of it and, arguably, influenced Hoover’s
April 1951 recommendation
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Ethel’s death sentence. The evidence, even for _conspiracy_ to
commit espionage, as charged, was too flimsy. That the FBI knew this
is supported by an internal FBI memo dated July 17, 1950, the day of
Julius’s arrest. It reported that the Bureau had been advised by the
Justice Department’s Criminal Division that “there was
insufficient evidence to issue process against [Ethel] at this
time.” Instead, as is now well-known, she was to be used as a
“lever” (Hoover’s word) on her husband to force a confession and
to implicate accomplices.

But she refused to buckle (“She called our bluff,” the deputy
attorney-general, William Rogers told _New York Times _reporter Sam
Roberts
[[link removed]],
author of a book about Ethel’s brother David Greenglass) and her
silence sealed her fate. If her brother had not cut a deal and lied in
court so his wife could escape prosecution, Ethel would have been
spared the death sentence. But once sentenced, she had only a
Hobson’s choice: disavow Julius or accept death. In refusing
clemency, President Eisenhower believed
[[link removed]).] “she
has obviously been the leader in everything they did in the spy
ring.” He was wrong. Weinstein and Vassiliev
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most she played only a minor, supporting role,” which—had it not
been for the heated legal and political atmosphere—would have led to
a short jail term and “perhaps not even to her arrest.” Moreover,
as the NSA and the FBI had concluded, awareness and knowledge was not
tantamount to active complicity or conspiracy. Definitive proof was
absent.

It is not my intention here to revisit the well-trodden ground of
prosecutorial and judicial misconduct or the perjured testimony of the
Greenglasses during Ethel’s trial. Suffice to say that a
forensic analysis
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legal scholars of her indictment and conviction concluded that, from
the outset, the FBI knew its case against her was threadbare, “too
weak to justify arresting her, much less prosecuting her,” but
pressured David and Ruth Greenglass into “remembering”—we now
know falsely—Ethel typing notes for Julius. Their testimony was
crucial to Ethel’s conviction. David’s public admission
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2001 and the unsealing of Ruth’s grand jury testimony
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2008 confirmed the former’s perjury and the latter’s
contradictions. A flagrant miscarriage of justice had occurred.

Why, then, do some historians argue that Ethel’s innocence is a myth
“untethered” from conclusive evidence of her guilt? Their
arguments hinge primarily on two sets of sources: the fragmentary
Venona decrypts, and the transcribed notebooks smuggled out of Moscow
by the former KGB operative and journalist Alexander Vassiliev
[[link removed]]. Supporters of the
position that Ethel was a functioning spy rely heavily on the
September 21, 1944, cable
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above). Those three words, “and his wife,” are central to their
argument that Ethel was engaged in a conspiracy. However, the cable,
in an earlier sentence, had Julius alone recommending Ruth, “with a
safe flat in view.” Vassiliev transcribed this same cable as
“‘Liberal’ has recommended Ruth Greenglass” with no mention of
“his wife.” A November 14, 1944, cable
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implicated Ruth—she “agreed to cooperate with us in drawing in
[David]”—but, again, it contains no reference to Ethel.

The second Venona cable
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which Ethel is mentioned (New York to Moscow, November 27,1944) was a
response from the New York station to Moscow Center, which sought
information about Ethel—about whom it was ignorant. Hence the
profile and the reply that she “did not work.” We need to recall
the all-important fact that this cable did not include a code
name—in contrast to other identified members of the spy group. And
we must also remember that in order to be guilty of conspiracy, one
must participate in at least one overt act in furtherance of that
conspiracy.

If the Venona decryptions fail to implicate Ethel, is there
“abundant evidence,” as claimed
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from the Soviet archives, thanks to Vassiliev? Klehr and Mark Kramer
assert that Vassiliev’s documents “show that Ethel suggested other
people Julius could recruit to turn over secret information.”
However, a thorough search of the eight notebooks
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not yield such evidence, nor is there any reference to it in Haynes,
Klehr and Vassiliev’s exhaustive _Spies: The Rise and Fall of the
KGB in America_
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that she “suggested” names to the KGB is without foundation: There
is no extant evidence of any liaison with a Soviet operative. Indeed,
Julius’s Soviet handler from 1944, Alexander Feklisov
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claimed that not only did he never meet Ethel but she was
“completely innocent” and had nothing to do with the espionage.

Rather than the case being closed on Ethel’s guilt, as alleged, the
Gardner memorandum absolves her, as the FBI knew at the time of her
execution. Now is the time for an historic injustice to be redressed.
Now is the time for Joe Biden to issue a full exoneration or, at the
least, a presidential pardon of Ethel Rosenberg. Truth and justice
will thereby be served.

_[PHILLIP DEERY is an Australian emeritus professor of history and
author of books on McCarthyism
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War in Australia
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_Copyright c 2025 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_ Please support progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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* Ethel Rosenberg
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* Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
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* The Rosenberg Case
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* McCarthyism
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* exoneration
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* Presidential Pardons
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* Joe Biden
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* Roy Cohn
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* Cold War
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* FBI
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* FBI frameup
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* Death Penalty
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* National Security Agency
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