Why Julius And Ethel Rosenberg Were Executed

From All That's Interesting:

Both before and after it happened, the execution was highly controversial. At the time of their trial, even J. Edgar Hoover opposed the execution of Ethel Rosenberg, believing it would reflect badly on the FBI. Most U.S. newspapers believed it was fair punishment, while European publications and citizens generally did not. Regardless of the sentence’s fairness, the question of their guilt remained murky for decades as well. Finally, new evidence began to come to light as much as a half-century after the fact. Documents from the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service’s Venona Project of the 1940s, aimed to gather and decode Soviet messages, weren’t declassified until 1995. Finally, they proved Julius Rosenberg was indeed a spy (his codename was “LIBERAL”). (Read more.)

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