Confessions of a Spy: 'Now I Know It Was an Illusion'

The hardcore leftists and defenders of the Rosenbergs will never want to admit it, but a man convicted along with them for spying has now admitted it at age 91.

A few years ago, I asked Morton Sobell an impertinent question. Sobell is the only living American defendant in the Rosenberg atomic spy case. The reason he’s the only survivor is because the other two, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1953.

The Rosenbergs were formally charged with conspiracy to commit espionage, but were accused by prosecutors and the judge of stealing a sketch and other secrets to the atomic bomb, delivering them to the Russians and being all but responsible for the Korean War.

Sobell was Julius Rosenberg’s classmate at City College. He was an electrical engineer. He was never implicated in atomic espionage, but was charged in the conspiracy with stealing other military and industrial secrets.

He was sentenced to 30 years. He served more than 18. He always professed his innocence. So, a couple of years ago, after the Soviet Union imploded and Communism collapsed, I tried a trick question: If he had been guilty of espionage, would he ever admit it?

“I can’t answer that,” Sobell replied.

Now, I know why.

The other day, Sobell confessed to me that he had spied for the Soviets. He’s 91 and lives in the Bronx. He is ailing, but insists his long-term memory is sound.

He told me that over the summer he reached out to his nemesis, the man whose testimony helped convict him. He also said he was working on an article [with the author Walter Schneir] that amounted to a semiconfession.

Did that mean he was, in fact, a spy?

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Sobell replied. “Call it that. I never thought of it in those terms.”

“I haven’t considered myself a spy,” he said. “Isn’t that funny? You use that word ‘spy,’ it has connotations.”

Was Julius Rosenberg a spy?

“He was a spy, but no more than I was,” Sobell replied. “He gave nothing, in the end it was nothing. The sketch was negligible and the government lied in presenting it as the secret to the atomic bomb. They never harmed this country, because what they transmitted was wrong.”

Sobell, like the Rosenbergs, was a Communist. He was a true believer when a rose-colored view of Russia idealized Communism as a welcome antidote to capitalism — which, after all, had failed many Americans during the Depression — and to anti-Semitism, which was prevalent even in cosmopolitan places like New York, but was supposedly banned in Russia.

“Now I know it was an illusion,” Sobell says. “I was taken in.”

So, it turns out, were all those supporters who believed he was innocent.

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