Bolstering a revisionist view of the late Sen. McCarthy and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee:
Figure in Rosenberg case finally admits spying for Soviets
By Sam Roberts
Published: September 12, 2008
NEW YORK: In 1951, Morton Sobell was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges. He served more than 18 years in Alcatraz and other federal prisons, traveled to Cuba and Vietnam after his release in 1969 and became an advocate for progressive causes.
Through it all, he maintained his innocence.
But on Thursday, Sobell, 91, dramatically reversed himself, shedding new light on a case that still fans smoldering political passions [ amongst an ethnic group which is not to be named].
In an interview, he admitted for the first time that he had been a Soviet spy.
And he implicated his fellow defendant Julius Rosenberg in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information and what the U.S. government described as the secret to the atomic bomb.
In the interview with The New York Times, whose global edition is the International Herald Tribune, Sobell, who lives in New York, was asked whether as an electrical engineer he turned over military secrets to the Soviets during World War II when they were considered allies of the United States and were bearing the brunt of Nazi brutality. Was he, in fact, a spy?
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that," he replied. "I never thought of it as that in those terms."
...
Sobell made his disclosures on Thursday as the National Archives, in response to a lawsuit filed by historians, journalists and a private group, the National Security Archive, released most of the grand jury testimony in the espionage conspiracy case against him and the Rosenbergs.
...
In the interview, Sobell drew a distinction between atomic espionage and the details of radar and artillery devices he said he stole for the Russians.
"What I did was simply defensive, an aircraft gun," he said. "This was defensive. You cannot plead that what you did was only defensive stuff, but there's a big difference between giving that and stuff that could be used to attack our country."
(One device mentioned specifically by Sobell, the SCR 584 radar, is believed by military experts to have been used against U.S. aircraft in Korea and Vietnam.)
...
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/12/america/spy.php?page=1