They are graying now, stooped of shoulder and quavery of voice, and a scraggly pigtail dangles from the defiant head of Morton Sobell, who spent 20 years in Federal prison as an accomplice in the Rosenberg spy case. One soon learned to stand slightly upwind when they clustered. And what an odd forum for this dwindling band of hard-core leftists to shout their anger at reality: the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington, the intellectual epicenter of the American military establishment, at a conference sponsored by the CIA and the National Security Agency.

The occasion celebrated the release of a final batch of the Venona papers, intercepted Soviet spy messages from the 1940s that are irrefutable proof that (a) the key figures is celebrated cases of decades ago were indeed guilty and (b) the Communist Party, USA, helped the USSR in espionage directed against the United States.

Sobell was especially vociferous in denouncing the documentary evidence that Soviet spy masters unwittingly supplied to American codebreakers and the FBI. To Sobell, the Venona papers are “Alice in Wonderlandish.” He charged that he intercepts were “interpreted” to fit conclusions already drawn by an overzealous FBI. Director J. Edgar Hoover, he claimed, revealed his bias by using the codename ‘LIBERAL’ to refer to Julius Rosenberg. What else is needed, Sobell lamented, to prove that Rosenberg and wife Ethel were persecuted because of their liberal politics?

Well, Sobell got the story slightly wrong. LIBERAL in fact does appear in Venona as a code name for Rosenberg. But the word was selected not by Hoover, but by Soviet controllers in New York, one of two names the Soviets used in referring to Rosenberg.

Rosenberg made an early Venona appearance in a cable from New York to Moscow on July 26, 1944, under his first codename, ANTENNA. The message described a 10 day visit to Washington (CARTHAGE, in Soviet spy parlance) during which Rosenberg recruited Max Elitcher, who was a gunnery specialist for the Navy’s Bureau of Standards. The message gave Elitcher’s professional background and described his wife as a War Department psychologist and a FELLOW COUNTRYWOMAN (member of the Communist Party, USA). Elitcher was “loyal, reliable” and an excellent photographer, Rosenberg reported.

Referring to Elitcher, Morton Sobell asked, scorn dripping from his voice, “I’d love to know who did the initial identification.” He got an answer from retired FBI agent Robert Lamphere, who headed espionage investigations during the 1940s. After an intensive investigation, Lamphere said, “We found Elitcher, and he gave us a statement naming Rosenberg,” as the man who recruited him in Washington in 1944.

Miriam Schneir, who with husband Walter wrote “Investigation to an Inquest,” about the Alger Hiss case, demanded to know how the FBI identified Elitcher. Not all that difficult, replied Lamphere; his real name was given in the Venona cable, as was other identifying biographical information.

On Sept. 2, 1944, New York told Maj. Gen. P.M. Fitin, the Soviet spy boss, of changes of code names for a number of agents, including ANTENNA to LIBERAL. There are subsequent frequent referrals to work being done by LIBERAL.

But Rosenberg defenders are not dissuaded by the newly released evidence. Ignoring the plethora of smoking guns contained in Venona, they insist that some still hidden secret will yet exonerate the executed spies. Marshall Perlin, attorney for the Rosenbergs, Sobell, and the Rosenberg sons argued on a panel that the Venona papers are not authentic, but “created files” derived from FBI assumptions and misinformation. And although 250,000 to 300,000 pages of FBI files have been released. Perlin lamented that there still must be more hidden away. It is “simply not true” that Venona establishes the Rosenbergs’ guilt, he said. A similar argument came from William Reuben, whose book on the Rosenberg case, “The Atom Spy Hoax” was distributed world wide by the Communist apparatus.

Retired agent Lamphere did surprise many of the leftists with a statement that both he and Hoover opposed executing Ethel Rosenberg. Lamphere said that although the evidence supported her guilt, she was not as deeply involved in spying as was Julius. He also thought it unwise to execute the mother of two small children. But President Eisenhower refused to interfere with the judicial process and commute her sentence.

A CIA historian involved in arranging the conference, which the auditorium size limited to 400 attendees, said leftists such as Perlin and Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation, were given slots on the program “for balance.” But he jested after the first ay, “If we suddenly found a filmed interview in which the Rosenbergs admitted guilt, they’d still be whining about ‘innocence.’” We agree with the historian Ronald Radosh, who told the leftists, “Stop groping for more fairy tales. The time for that has passed.” Cases closed.

Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@AIM.org.