Lies about red spies.

ITEM: A Washington Post feature column for December 3 promoted several movies that ostensibly "tackle McCarthyism," including the documentary "Heir to an Execution" by Ivy Meeropol--described as "the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of espionage at the height of the Cold War and executed in 1953.... The Rosenbergs chose to die rather than betray their convictions."

ITEM: A Toronto Star article for November 20 diminished the guilt of the Rosenbergs, saying, "Perhaps no other miscarriage of justice in post-war United States has embedded itself so deeply in the imagination as the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In an atmosphere of anti-communist hysteria, the two were convicted of treason but the case against them was tenuous--no physical evidence was presented at the trial--and left sufficient doubts to fuel a five-decade debate about their guilt."

CORRECTION: Hailing the Rosenbergs as victims and principled martyrs to an altruistic cause is either misguided foolishness or purposeful prevarication. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were Communist traitors who betrayed their country by engaging in atomic espionage on behalf of a monstrous conspiracy ultimately responsible for the deaths of perhaps a hundred million people. They also chose to orphan their own young children (Robert and Michael Meeropol) rather than testily about their criminal complicity with their Soviet spy masters. It is likely that the government would not have demanded the death penalty if the Rosenbergs had confessed and identified their collaborators.

Any reasonable doubts about the Rosenbergs' guilt should have been swept away by the 1995 release of decrypted Soviet spy cables from the 1940s, including details of the Rosenbergs' espionage activities--evidence gleaned from a secret U.S. counterintelligence effort known as the Venona Project. Apologists for Ethel Rosenberg notwithstanding, she too was guilty. As noted by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr in Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Yale University Press, 1999), the Venona documents "confirm that she was a participant in her husband's espionage and in the recruitment of her brother for atomic espionage."

Julius, who once ran eight agents himself, also was involved in disclosing other U.S. military secrets. The Soviet rezidentura in New York informed his bosses that Julius Rosenberg "had provided information on a 'robot' bomb that would be mounted on aircraft carriers for use against Japan"--as noted in The Venona Secrets by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel (Regnery, 2000). He personally stole vital military information. As Professors Haynes and Klehr remarked, when Rosenberg was employed on a classified military project at Emerson Radio, he "achieved a singular espionage coup, stealing a working sample of the proximity fuze, one of the most innovative advances of American military technology in World War II." The 2001 memoirs of Julius' KGB case officer Aleksandr Feklisov--entitled The Man Behind the Rosenbergs--describe some 50 occasions when Julius passed along secrets for Stalinist Moscow.

No, these traitors and spies were not latter-day Jeanne d'Arcs. As one prison informant reported to the FBI, "Julius is fanatically devoted to the cause of Communism and is prepared to die for it." He did. The Rosenbergs deserved no less.