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Guardian | Brother's lies helped to send Ethel Rosenberg to the chairBrother's lies helped to send Ethel Rosenberg to the chair Convicted spy says he was advised to shop his sister to protect himself and his wife Michael Ellison in New York Thursday December 6, 2001 The Guardian One of the most enduring controversies of the cold war, the trial and executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as Soviet spies, was revived last night when her convicted brother said that he had lied at the trial to save himself and his wife. "As a spy who turned his family in, I don't care," David Greenglass, 79, said on his first public appearance for more than 40 years. "I sleep very well. I would not sacrifice my wife and my children for my sister." The Rosenbergs, the only Americans executed for cold war treason, were put to death in Sing Sing prison, New York, in June 1953, two years after they were tried for conspiring to steal US atomic secrets for the Soviet Union. Liberal opinion held that they were victims of the rabidly anti-communist sentiment of those times, though most authorities acknowledge now that they were probably guilty. Mr Greenglass, who lives under an assumed identity, was sentenced to 15 years and released from prison in 1960. He said in a taped interview on last night's CBS television programme 60 Minutes that he, too, gave the Russians atomic secrets and information about a newly invented detonator. He said he gave false testimony because he feared that his wife Ruth might be charged, and that he was encouraged by the prosecution to lie. He gave the court the most damning evidence against his sister: that she had typed up his spying notes, intended for transmission to Moscow, on a Remington portable typewriter. Now he says that this testimony was based on the recollection of his wife rather than his own first-hand knowledge. "I don't know who typed it, frankly, and to this day I can't remember that the typing took place," he said last night. "I had no memory of that at all - none whatsoever." Asked why he thought his sister and her husband, who went to their death insisting that they were innocent, did not admit espionage, he said: "One word - stupidity." This, he said, made Ethel Rosenberg responsible for her own death in the electric chair. He was still haunted by the case, he said, but added: "My wife says, 'Look, we're still alive.' "I had no idea they would give them the death sentence." The interview coincided with the publication of a book by Sam Roberts: The Brother. "Hand-written or typed, the notes contained little or nothing that was new," Roberts writes. "But from the prosecution's perspective, the Remington was as good as a smoking gun in Ethel Rosenberg's hands. "This was a time when people were terrified. There was no way the Russians could have obtained the atomic bomb without stealing it from us." Mr Greenglass, who also admits lying before a congressional committee, said that if he met the Rosenbergs' sons he would say he was sorry that their parents had died, but would not apologise for his part in their convictions. The couple said in their final note to their children: "Be composed, then, that we were serene and understood with the deepest kind of understanding that civilisation had not as yet progressed to the point where life did not have to be lost for the sake of life." Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001 ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9WB2D Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
