Showing posts with label Espionage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Espionage. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 07, 2013


Rosenberg Code

The Rosenbergs

On June 19th 1953 the Rosenberg’s, Julius and Ethel were executed. Still to the last claiming that they were innocent. We now know that those protests were hollow and false yet how and why the Rosenberg’s to the last proclaimed their innocence and convinced so many that they were so is a continuing mystery in many respects.

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

Insipid Romanticism

Mary I Queen of Scots

Mary Queen of Scots is a favourite with the public in that if they know a ruler of Scotland they are more than likely to know that she was Queen of Scotland. One of only four reigning Queens of Scotland.1 Because of Mary I’s tragic fate, i.e., being overthrown and then imprisoned in England and then executed after more than a decade and a half of being imprisoned by order of Queen Elizabeth I of England, Mary – Queen of Scots, became a figure of romance and a figure in “popular” history. The number of fictional accounts, i.e., novels, about Mary – Queen of Scots, is huge and there is even a good play about Mary’s life by Schiller.2

This romanticism has spilled over into actual historical work and as coloured perceptions of Mary and her great antagonist Elizabeth I of England.

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Moral Cretinism Part VII
The CPUSA, Stalin and Espionage
A Book Review

Book Cover

Ideological struggles and Academic one upmanship is as old as, well, academia and no doubt will exist as long as man exists a recent example of this is the victory dance academic one upmanship performed after the fall of Communism.

Or to give a more particular example the case of spying for the Soviet Union and the American Communist party. Case in point the book In Denial by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr.1 In the book our heroes, (Because that is how they see themselves), pat themselves on the back and do a victory dance.

Monday, February 28, 2011

Note on the Rosenberg Case

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in Prison

On June 19, 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed by means of electrocution for the crime of spying for the Soviet Union.1 At the time and later the case generated a great deal of heat and controversy. Many people thought that the Rosenbergs were victims of a government frame up.2 In fact as late as the 1990’s many still thought the Rosenbergs as innocent.3 For example Fred Inglis writes:

Evidence-conscious as we all are now we have to say solemnly at this juncture that we cannot know for sure that Greenglass’s story was all tarradiddle. But Greenglass was a known perjurer who was desperate to climb out of trouble; he was also an extremely low-level lens-grinder for the Los Alamos project. Julius Rosenberg was an honest sap. At the trial Rosenberg doggedly, ingenuously said that he felt the Soviets had made life better for the underdog, had restored the fabric of the country, had helped destroy the “Hitler beast” who destroyed Jewry.

Alger Hiss, like the Rosenbergs, still stands in an obscure position between innocence and guilt in the case history of American law.4