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Rosenberg Spies

In 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of
passing information to the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR) concerning the construction of nuclear
weapons. In 1953, the United States Government executed
them. Some say, the Rosenbergs received their just
punishment. Many historians feel that the trial was unfair,
and that international claims for clemency were wrongly
ignored. These historians claim that the Rosenbergs were
assassinated by the US government. This report will be an
analysis of the trial, the events which led up to it, and its
aftermath. What Led to the Arrest? The first clue America
had that a Russian spy ring existed in the US was the
discovery of a KGB codebook on the Finnish battlefield
during World War II. When compared with Germany's
machine-scrambled codes, the code appeared to be
relatively primitive; a certain set of numbers corresponded
to a word, letter, or essential phrase. There was a little
catch though; the codebook was to be read with a
corresponding page that every KGB officer was given.
Because the American ciphers did not have the
corresponding page, there were an infinite number of
possibilities that could have corresponded to the book,
making deciphering it impossible. (Milton 7) Klaus Fuchs
In 1944, the FBI raided the New York offices of the
Soviet Government Purchasing Commission, a known front
for the KGB industrial espionage operations. When the
FBI began to go through what they had taken, they found
that many KGB officers did not adhere to their orders
diligently. They were told to dispose of all their
"corresponding sheets." Many memos and other letters
were carelessly stored away, instead of being destroyed
after their use. After much studying of all the confiscated
letters of the KGB, including the new sheets, the ciphers
were now able to elucidate some of the codebook they had
found earlier. In 1949, a report by Klaus Fuchs was
deciphered. This was America's first solid...