What made Ethel a bit different was a taste for the arts. Undoubtedly, these harsh conditions made Ethel and her future husband susceptible to the overtures from the radical left. Her brother, David Greenglass, became the main witness against his sister, and their mother stood with David and pleaded with Ethel to adopt the path he had chosen. For her, the real story is not Ethel’s betrayal of her country, but her brother’s and mother’s unwillingness to go along with her cover-up.

But she says Ethel’s guilt or innocence is beside the point. Sebba fully acknowledges Communism’s horrors and quotes many observers who point out how Communists abandoned use of their own minds, giving up their autonomy to follow the Party’s dictates and policies blindly. Sebba’s narrative revolves around one question central to any author who takes up the Rosenberg case: Was Ethel guilty as charged, or innocent as she claimed to be? Sebba, a Briton and author of a previous biography of Wallis Simpson, the Dutchess of Windsor, tells us from the start that although Ethel was a member of the Communist Party, she “was not, I believe, a spy.” She acknowledges that Ethel was hardly a saint, was committed to the cause, and was “fiercely loyal to her beloved husband, who undoubtedly was a Communist spy, passing military secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II.” But if she had been guilty and had participated with Julius in spying for Stalin’s Soviet Union, why would she refuse to cooperate with the government once caught? Why did she continue to claim innocence when she knew that her passing and that of her husband would not only orphan their two children, Michael and Robert, but mire them in a lifetime of pain?

The question one must ask is whether a new biography is even necessary and what new information the author brings to the table. The second came in 1998, from Ilene Philipson. Virginia Gardner, a Communist activist, wrote the first during the frenzied public campaign to save the lives of Ethel and Julius. Anne Sebba has just published the third biography of Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed in 1953 along with her husband Julius for conspiracy to commit espionage against the United States on behalf of the Soviet Union.

Espionage definition cold war