70 Years After Their Executions, Rosenberg Sons Still Looking to Clear Mother’s Name

Seventy years after the exe­cu­tions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, their sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, have renewed their efforts to clear their mother’s name. Just ten and six years old when their par­ents were exe­cut­ed for fed­er­al charges of con­spir­a­cy to com­mit espi­onage, both men grew up believ­ing in their par­ents’ inno­cence. The Rosenbergs remain the only indi­vid­u­als put to death for peace­time espi­onage in American history. 

There have always been seri­ous ques­tions about Ethel’s guilt in par­tic­u­lar. The key tes­ti­mo­ny against her (by her broth­er) was a lie, as he lat­er admit­ted. The gov­ern­ment also used the pros­e­cu­tion of Ethel to force Julius to con­fess. In July 2022, the Meeropols filed two addi­tion­al FOIA requests with the NSA and National Archives, request­ing the release of all doc­u­ments relat­ing to their mother.

In the post-Watergate era, both men advo­cat­ed for greater gov­ern­men­tal trans­paren­cy, ulti­mate­ly bol­ster­ing the 1975 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) as a tool to request files regard­ing their par­ents’ case. The doc­u­ments received from the ini­tial requests sup­port­ed the idea that the Rosenbergs were framed, indi­cat­ing ​“that the tri­al Judge, Irving R. Kaufman, secret­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed with the pros­e­cu­tion team, includ­ing the infa­mous late Ray Cohn, an assis­tant U.S. attor­ney who helped pros­e­cute [their] par­ents and played a cru­cial role in con­vict­ing [their] moth­er by orches­trat­ing what may have been per­ju­ri­ous tes­ti­mo­ny.” While this infor­ma­tion sup­port­ed their par­ents’ inno­cence, sub­se­quent infor­ma­tion from the National Security Agency’s (NSA) 1995 VENONA tran­scripts shows ​“that [their] father engaged in mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al espi­onage for the Soviet Union in the 1940s.” At the time of their ini­tial FOIA request, the Meeropols did not know the NSA has been involved in their par­ents’ case and it took more than twen­ty years after the VENONA release to dis­cov­er that the NSA may not have released all their files relat­ed to ​“secret Soviet communications.”

As of December 2022, the National Archives noti­fied the broth­ers that there are pos­si­bly ​“500,000 pages in more than 200 clas­si­fied box­es” that may per­tain to their most recent request for infor­ma­tion, in addi­tion to sev­er­al box­es from the NSA. 

Michael and Robert Meeropol are now call­ing on Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to release the records relat­ed to their mother’s case, per an exec­u­tive order from President Obama. The broth­ers write that ​“just as jus­tice delayed is jus­tice denied, so infor­ma­tion delayed is infor­ma­tion denied. We are now 80 and 76, and we would like to know the full truth about our mother’s case before we die… Let the chips fall where they may.”