Seventy-five years ago, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. During their trial the following year in 1951, presiding judge Irving Kauffman termed their actions in passing secrets to the Soviet Union “worse than murder.” Despite a worldwide campaign for clemency, the Rosenbergs were executed in Sing Sing prison in 1953. American society was deeply fractured between detractors who believed that their treason constituted—in the words of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—the “crime of the century,” and supporters convinced that they were innocent victims of Cold War hysteria. Since 1953, the Rosenberg case continued to haunt a generation of Americans, and passionate arguments over their guilt or innocence persisted.

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.

Gardner wrote his memorandum 11 days after Ethel was arrested. Because he liaised closely with the FBI, and because of the significance of the case, it seems almost certain that J. Edgar Hoover would have been apprised of it and, arguably, influenced Hoover’s April 1951 recommendation against Ethel’s death sentence. The evidence, even for conspiracy to commit espionage, as charged, was too flimsy. That the FBI knew this is supported by an internal FBI memo dated July 17, 1950, the day of Julius’s arrest. It reported that the Bureau had been advised by the Justice Department’s Criminal Division that “there was insufficient evidence to issue process against [Ethel] at this time.” Instead, as is now well-known, she was to be used as a “lever” (Hoover’s word) on her husband to force a confession and to implicate accomplices.

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But she refused to buckle (“She called our bluff,” the deputy attorney-general, William Rogers told New York Times reporter Sam Roberts, author of a book about Ethel’s brother David Greenglass) and her silence sealed her fate. If her brother had not cut a deal and lied in court so his wife could escape prosecution, Ethel would have been spared the death sentence. But once sentenced, she had only a Hobson’s choice: disavow Julius or accept death. In refusing clemency, President Eisenhower believed “she has obviously been the leader in everything they did in the spy ring.” He was wrong. Weinstein and Vassiliev conclude that “at most she played only a minor, supporting role,” which—had it not been for the heated legal and political atmosphere—would have led to a short jail term and “perhaps not even to her arrest.” Moreover, as the NSA and the FBI had concluded, awareness and knowledge was not tantamount to active complicity or conspiracy. Definitive proof was absent.

It is not my intention here to revisit the well-trodden ground of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct or the perjured testimony of the Greenglasses during Ethel’s trial. Suffice to say that a forensic analysis by five legal scholars of her indictment and conviction concluded that, from the outset, the FBI knew its case against her was threadbare, “too weak to justify arresting her, much less prosecuting her,” but pressured David and Ruth Greenglass into “remembering”—we now know falsely—Ethel typing notes for Julius. Their testimony was crucial to Ethel’s conviction. David’s public admission to Roberts in 2001 and the unsealing of Ruth’s grand jury testimony in 2008 confirmed the former’s perjury and the latter’s contradictions. A flagrant miscarriage of justice had occurred.

Why, then, do some historians argue that Ethel’s innocence is a myth “untethered” from conclusive evidence of her guilt? Their arguments hinge primarily on two sets of sources: the fragmentary Venona decrypts, and the transcribed notebooks smuggled out of Moscow by the former KGB operative and journalist Alexander Vassiliev. Supporters of the position that Ethel was a functioning spy rely heavily on the September 21, 1944, cable (cited above). Those three words, “and his wife,” are central to their argument that Ethel was engaged in a conspiracy. However, the cable, in an earlier sentence, had Julius alone recommending Ruth, “with a safe flat in view.” Vassiliev transcribed this same cable as “‘Liberal’ has recommended Ruth Greenglass” with no mention of “his wife.” A November 14, 1944, cable directly implicated Ruth—she “agreed to cooperate with us in drawing in [David]”—but, again, it contains no reference to Ethel.

The second Venona cable in which Ethel is mentioned (New York to Moscow, November 27,1944) was a response from the New York station to Moscow Center, which sought information about Ethel—about whom it was ignorant. Hence the profile and the reply that she “did not work.” We need to recall the all-important fact that this cable did not include a code name—in contrast to other identified members of the spy group. And we must also remember that in order to be guilty of conspiracy, one must participate in at least one overt act in furtherance of that conspiracy.

If the Venona decryptions fail to implicate Ethel, is there “abundant evidence,” as claimed, from the Soviet archives, thanks to Vassiliev? Klehr and Mark Kramer assert that Vassiliev’s documents “show that Ethel suggested other people Julius could recruit to turn over secret information.” However, a thorough search of the eight notebooks did not yield such evidence, nor is there any reference to it in Haynes, Klehr and Vassiliev’s exhaustive Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. The inference that she “suggested” names to the KGB is without foundation: There is no extant evidence of any liaison with a Soviet operative. Indeed, Julius’s Soviet handler from 1944, Alexander Feklisov, claimed that not only did he never meet Ethel but she was “completely innocent” and had nothing to do with the espionage.

Rather than the case being closed on Ethel’s guilt, as alleged, the Gardner memorandum absolves her, as the FBI knew at the time of her execution. Now is the time for an historic injustice to be redressed. Now is the time for Joe Biden to issue a full exoneration or, at the least, a presidential pardon of Ethel Rosenberg. Truth and justice will thereby be served.