Family of Spies

In the summer of 1950, federal agents arrived at a modest apartment in lower Manhattan and arrested an electrical engineer named Julius Rosenberg on charges of passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union. Six weeks later, they came for his wife Ethel - a seamstress and mother of two small boys aged seven and three - and took her from the courthouse door in circumstances that the FBI's own internal documents would later reveal had nothing to do with the strength of the evidence against her and everything to do with what the government needed her to be.

Three years later, on the evening of June 19, 1953, the United States government executed them both.





What happened in between - the fabricated testimony, the compromised judge, the private conversations between prosecutor and bench before a single witness had been sworn, the brother who sent his sister to the electric chair and later admitted he had lied - is one of the most documented, most contested, and most consequential miscarriages of justice in the history of American law.





Family of Spies is the complete, documented account of what the United States government did to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, why it did it, and what the record it left behind demands of everyone who reads it.

The verdict was returned in 1951. The questions it failed to answer have never stopped accumulating.