(Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in custody, 1951. Photo Associated Press).
Well, they didn’t shut down the Government, which had a lot of people concerned here in town, but I didn’t notice any difference. What is topping the charts is Hurricane Joaquin who is arcing north and which, combined with a stalled low-pressure front, threatens to dump a foot of rain on our heads.
We don’t do weather well here in Your Nation’s Capital, and I think a discerning person would get the hell out of the way. I will head down to the farm, and maybe pick up some batteries on the way. I know the oil lamps will work as well, just in case.
So taken with the jitters that the weather brings, you can imagine the rest of what passes for news kind of ran by in a blur. They executed that woman down in Geeroge- Kelly Gissendaner was her name. Apparently she conspired with a lover to bump off her husband. First woman executed in several decades, so it was news. The curious thing was the guy who actually killed the hubbie is doing life in the slammer, not pushing up daisies.
I have a generally uneasy feeling about the death penalty. I am concerned any time the State determines that it has the power of life and death over citizens and exercises the option to kill. On the other hand, there are some crimes that are so unambiguously evil that the perpetrator should not live at the taxpayer’s expense, and the object lesson to others is well worth it.
Yeah, yeah, I know it is possible for the innocent to be convicted, and believe that death sentences ought to have the strictest standards for review. I just read a book about a heinous crime committed in Casper, Wyoming, back in 1973. It is called “The Darkest Night,” by Ron Franscell and is a compelling, if horrifying, read.
A couple dirt-bags kidnapped two young sisters and hurled them off a bridge after terrorizing and raping one of them. The younger sister died from the fall, while the other survived with horrendous injuries. They were convicted and got the death penalty, but were saved by a Supreme Court decision at the last moment. One died in jail, and as far as I know, the other is still alive.
The most poignant part of the story is that the girl who survived was unable to deal with the consequences of the trauma, and threw herself to her death from the same bridge years later.
Like the author, I think the pair should have been executed, though I can understand that reasonable people can disagree on the matter. Then I saw something in the Wall Street Journal that brought me up short in amazement.
I have told you before about the campus across the street from where I live. There is a long relationship between Arlington Hall Station and the spook community. It is the George Schultz Center for Foreign Service Training these days, but in World War II it was the HQ of the Army code-breakers, and then when the war was done, the Armed Forces Security Agency, the immediate predecessor to NSA. It was there that a remarkable piece of code-breaking was achieved.
The Russians had used an enciphering system based on “one time pads,” a means by which the code is used only once, and is considered to be impervious to any analysis. Turns out that there was a brief hiccough in the Soviet system. Due to the pressure of the advancing Nazis, some codes were used multiple times between 1942 and the end of the war. That gave the Army cryptanalysts a chance to start to break them, or at least until an NKVD spy assigned to Arlington Hall got word back to his Soviet masters that they had been compromised.
The program was called VENONA, and for what it was worth, the spy was a US Army officer named Bill Weisband. The messages from the Soviet Embassy in Washington outlined the activities of hundreds of dedicated Americans who served Joseph Stalin’s thugs.
I don’t know what causes people to become traitors, but I do despise them. Anyway, the WSJ article was by a fellow named Ron Radosh. He wrote in amazement that the New York City Council issued a proclamation this week honoring Ethel Rosenberg on what would have her 100th birthday. Monday was designated the “Ethel Rosenberg Day of Justice in the Borough of Manhattan.”
You probably recall that the Rosenbergs were part of the ring that stole the Atomic secrets from the National lab at Los Alamos, and transmitted them to the Soviets, significantly assisting their efforts to develop their own A-bomb. I don’t know about you, but I find Communists armed with nuclear weapons to be an alarming development. I suspect most people back when Stalin tested his first would agree.
Think about Iran with the bomb, only worse. The Cold War went really icy in 1949 with that blast.
The folks up in Manhattan praised Ethel’s work as a labor organizer and activist. Her sons- orphaned when their mother and father were electrocuted at Sing Sing in 1953- were there to push their claim that their Mom was “wrongfully executed.” They went on to call for the Feds to acknowledge “a terrible injustice.”
At the City Hall ceremony, Daniel Dromm who represents the Borough of Queens claimed that Ethel was the victim of what he called a “rush to judgment” after “a lot of hysteria was created around anticommunism.” Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer called the execution “a terrible stain on our country.”
Their version of the story is that Julius Rosenberg was an inept but sincere guy who didn’t really help the Russians that much. And Ethel was an innocent housewife who didn’t know anything. The bad guys in this fantasy were the FBI agents who busted them, and the prosecutors who got them convicted.
I am not sure when white became black, and everything passed through the looking glass. It started immediately, and people have been defending the Rosenbergs since they were sentenced. That is the same crowd that defended the despicable traitor Alger Hiss all those years.
Diplomat Hiss really was a spy for the Russians, and his denials were lies, plain and simple.
And as far as Ethel is concerned, Radosh puts it this way:
“A Nov. 21, 1944, VENONA decrypt has Julius telling the KGB that he and his wife both recommend the recruitment of Ruth Greenglass, David’s (a Los Alamos employee) wife. On Nov. 27, a KGB agent named Leonid Kvasnikov cabled that he considered Ethel “sufficiently well developed politically. Knows about her husband’s work” as well as that of other agents. He characterized her “positively and as a devoted person.”
That is confirmed by records smuggled out of Moscow by a Russian defector
who now lives in Britain, Alexander Vassiliev. His papers, copied meticulously from the KGB archive, demonstrate convincingly Ethel’s deep involvement in her husband’s espionage ring.
So New York has honored a traitor who helped to make the enemies of her country a nuclear power.
I suspect that the prosecutors back then would have preferred to handle the matter some other way. The other atomic spies did not even get life sentences. Ethel could have provided the truth about her involvement and plea-bargained her way out of the electric chair. People in the DoJ later said she had “called their bluff.”
But the depth of her commitment to Uncle Joe and his butchery was such that she was willing to orphan her children for The Cause. I will grant a grudging respect for that level of determination, even if I think her acts were despicable.
But I really am concerned about the level of delusion in New York, from the Mayor on down. If they want to have a commemoration of Ethel’s birthday, don’t you think they really ought to have it in Moscow? Or maybe Havana?
(Cuban stamp honoring the Rosenbergs. Didn’t we almost have the end of the world over something in Cuba one time? Photo Wikipedia).
Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303