The Rosenberg’s were as guilty as hell. Ron Radosh points out that even greater evidence against them was not presented during the trial because we did not want the U.S.S.R. to know that we had broken the Venona codes. Despite the end of the Cold War – Russia is still our enemy and her espionage against us has never ceased.
by Ronald Radosh
The emerging details about the Russian espionage ring exposed last week have bizarre echoes of classic Soviet-era spy cases.
Of course, the difference is obvious: Most of these 10 sleeper agents were Russian nationals given false American names and identities, rather than native-born traitors. Yet it’s remarkable how, nearly two decades after the fall of communism, ideology was still of vital importance to them.
Take “Juan Lazaro,” a Siberian-born Russian who posed as a Uruguayan national. He had married a Peruvian-born journalist who was also arrested, Vicky Palaez — and both are hard-line leftists.
Reds: Juan Lazaro (inset) and the Rosenbergs were willing to sacrifice even their children for their ideology
Last month, Fidel Castro himself quoted favorably one of Palaez’s articles lambasting the United States for “imperialism.” Lazaro taught Latin American and Caribbean politics at Baruch College, where his students said he regularly engaged in diatribes against America.
He even wrote and had published a paper heralding the supposed great work for women’s liberation — by having females engage in guerrilla operations — conducted in Peru by the Shining Path, a Maoist group dedicated to violent overthrow of the Peruvian government.
This fervent anti-Americanism recalls the ideological spies of the 1950s, like Alger Hiss and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Those communist agents were motivated by their belief that the
Soviet Union was on the right and just side of history. The USSR is no more — yet the Russians recruited by the SVR (the new name of the old KGB) seem to regard the spy agency as a vehicle for keeping alive the communist legacy of the old system.
Strikingly, like the Rosenbergs, these spies were willing to sacrifice their own children for the cause they serve, even if it means abandoning them to the care of strangers.
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg built a spy ring for the KGB that, among other work, stole US secrets to save the Soviets years in developing the atomic bomb. After their arrest in 1950, they feigned innocence — claiming to be regular parents with “progressive” views that led them to oppose the Truman administration’s Cold War foreign policy. They insisted they’d been framed by the FBI to scare others out of opposing President Harry S. Truman’s “fascist” warmongering.
Because it did not want to reveal that it had intercepted and decoded vast amounts of Soviet communications, our government could not disclose its most damning evidence against the Rosenbergs. The totalitarian system that the traitors served saw value in having them pose as martyrs — so they did.
To preserve their lie, they were willing to sacrifice their lives and make their sons orphans. In their final letter to their sons on June 19, 1953, Ethel Rosenberg manipulated her children into unknowingly dedicating their lives to serving the lie. “Always remember that we were innocent,” she wrote — pushing the boys to waste the rest of their lives trying to prove that false claim — “and could not wrong our conscience.”
Read the rest here: That Fifties Show
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