Executed ‘Soviet spy’ Ethel Rosenberg may have been innocent, court documents reveal

A Jewish-American woman executed for being a spy in 1953 may have been innocent, according to declassified documents.

Ethel Rosenberg was executed by electric chair at a New York prison after her brother testified that she had passed atomic secrets to the Soviets during the Cold War.

New documents released at the National Security Archive of George Washington University suggest her brother was lying.

It is believed David Greenglass had lied in order to protect his wife Ruth, who was thought to be the actual spy responsible.

The new evidence comes in the form of a grand jury testimony from 1950 after a judge ordered it to be released on public interest grounds last month.

Mrs Rosenberg was killed alongside her husband Julius. Their case divided America at the height of the Cold War.

The fact Mr Greenglass implicated his sister in the conspiracy just ten days before the trial was seen as a key factor in her conviction.

However he later told reporters that he had lied to protect Ruth, and that he had never witnessed his sister typing notes in her apartment, as he had previously claimed.

Intercepted cables proved Mr Rosenberg was a Soviet spy. Researchers have long believed that his wife was innocent but had stayed quiet, choosing to be “a martyr” and die together with her husband.

Mr Greenglass had himself been indicted as a co-conspirator.

At the trial, he told government prosecutors that he gave the couple highly sensitive data relating to scientists working on a top-secret Manhattan project to build the atomic bomb.

He told prosecutors he saw his sister transcribing information that he acquired from his job at Los Alamos, New Mexico, for her husband.

The newly released testimony, taken months before he implicated his sister, paints a different picture.

Mr Greenglass said he traded the information with Mr Rosenberg and his wife Ruth, insisting on more than one occasion he never spoke to Ethel about it.

Ilene Philipson, a biographer of the couple, said: “Ethel’s story is ultimately a very tragic one. There never really was any solid evidence against her.”