The “Venona” cables, declassified and released in 1995, highlighted Julius’s role. The Venona project intercepted and translated top-secret coded messages between Moscow and its overseas KGB stations. The cables revealed that Julius led a spy ring in New York in the 1940s. But there is now a new and important piece of evidence: a previously classified document released in August 2024 by the National Security Agency (NSA). Dated August 22, 1950, it is a memorandum from the senior codebreaker on the Venona project, Meredith Gardner, who concluded that Ethel was not a spy.
Historians and commentators have remained polarized over Ethel’s culpability. For Emory University historian Harvey Klehr, whose 2021 essay “The Eternal Return of Ethel Rosenberg” asks, “How has the myth of her innocence become so untethered from the evidence of her guilt?,” the case is closed: Ethel was rightly convicted—even if wrongly executed—and her defenders refuse to face the facts. Klehr agreed with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research director, Jonathan Brent, who argued that “the myth [of Ethel’s innocence] is not dependent on evidence, the myth is a matter of belief, which transcends evidence.… evidence doesn’t matter to those people who are true believers.” But evidence does matter to me. And the evidence points to Ethel’s innocence.
There are only two deciphered mentions of Ethel in the Venona cables. The first is a September 21, 1944, cable from the New York KGB station stating that “Liberal [Rosenberg] and his wife recommended her [Ruth Greenglass, Ethel’s sister-in-law] as an intelligent and clever girl,” whose apartment could be used as a safe house. The second is a November 27, 1944, cable profiling Ethel—significantly, she was identified by name and never assigned a codename, although codenames were customary for both sources and agents—that stated: “Knows about her husband’s work” (where “work” clearly implied espionage) but added, “In view of her delicate health does not work.” This was shared with the FBI in 1948. Ethel, in short, was certainly aware of Julius’s activities and possibly shared a recommendation, but the Venona cables confirm that, at most, she was peripheral to his spy ring.
The significance of Gardner’s 1950 memorandum is that it further exculpates Ethel from active engagement in undercover activity. With most of the Venona decryptions completed in 1948–49, the memorandum assessed what the decrypts meant. Given Gardner’s pivotal role in the project, his opinion was authoritative. His memo reviewed findings about the Rosenberg network under the heading “Atomic Espionage Spy Ring.” In Section 5, he validated the veracity of the November 1944 cable. He noted that “Mrs Rosenberg was a party member, a devoted wife, and that she knew about her husband’s work, but that due to ill health she did not engage in the work herself.” It is clear what Gardner meant here by “the work”: involvement in Julius’s espionage.