Morton Sobell

Morton Sobell (born April 11, 1917) was an American engineer with General Electric and Reeves Electronics who worked on military and government contracts, and who was subsequently found guilty of spying for the Soviets as a part of a ring that included Julius Rosenberg and others. Sobell was tried and convicted of espionage 1951, and sentenced to 30 years in prison. He was released in 1969 after spending 17 years and 9 months in Alcatraz and other high security prisons.

After proclaiming his innocence for over half a century, Sobell admitted to spying for the Soviets in an interview with The New York Times published on September 11, 2008, where he implicated Rosenberg.

Biography
Morton Sobell was born into a Jewish family in New York City. He attended the City College of New York where he received a degree in engineering and later married Helen Levitov (1918–2002). He worked in Washington, D.C. for the Navy Bureau of Ordnance and in Schenectady, New York, for the General Electric Company.

After being accused of espionage, he and his family fled to Mexico on June 22, 1950. He fled with his wife Helen, infant son Mark Sobell, and Helen's daughter from her previous marriage, Sydney. Sobell tried to travel to Europe, but without proper papers he was not able to leave. On August 16, 1950, Sobell and his family were abducted by armed men, taken to the United States border and turned over to the FBI. The FBI arrested him for conspiring with Julius Rosenberg to violate espionage laws. He was found guilty along with the Rosenbergs, and sentenced to 30 years. He was initially sent to Alcatraz, until the prison closed in 1963. He was released in 1969 after serving 17 years and 9 months.

Sobell as a political cause
Sobell's supposed innocence became a cause among progressive intellectuals who organized a Committee to Secure Justice for Morton Sobell. In 1978 the Corporation for Public Broadcasting produced a television special maintaining Sobell's innocence. The Monthly Review maintained that the government had presented "absolutely no proof" of Sobell's guilt, but had tried him merely "to give the impression that an extensive spy ring had been in operation." Bertrand Russell campaigned to overturn Sobell's conviction saying that his prison sentence was a grave miscarriage of justice against an innocent man.

In 1974 Sobell published a book, On Doing Time in which he maintained that he was innocent and that his conviction was a case of justice being subverted to serve political goals. After his release from prison, Sobell went on the speaker circuit, regaling audiences with his account of being falsely prosecuted and convicted by the federal government.

In a letter to the editor of The Nation in 2001, Sobell referred to himself as a "bona fide convicted spy". In 2008, at age 91, he told The New York Times that he did turn over military secrets to the Soviets during World War II, though he describes them as "junk" and says they were of no value to the Soviet Union. This was the first time he publicly admitted guilt.