Witness Changed Her Story During Rosenberg Spy Case

by Dave Keating | September 12, 2008 at 02:35 am

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Documents from the famous cold war court case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 accusing them of spying for the Russians have at long last been released, and they show that much of the evidence against the Rosenburgs was tenuous at best. The husband and wife were killed in the electric chair. The case came at the height of cold war hysteria.

A key prosecution witness whose testimony helped send Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair gave a different account at trial than she did before the grand jury in the famous Cold War spying case, according to documents released yesterday.

The revelations are contained in hundreds of pages of grand jury transcripts from the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for providing the Soviet Union with secrets that may have led to its development of an atomic bomb. More than half a century after the transcripts were sealed, a New York court ordered publication of the testimony of 41 of the 45 grand jury witnesses, including such key figures as Ethel Rosenberg and Ruth Greenglass, who was married to Ethel's brother, David Greenglass.