When Hannah Arendt invented the idea of “the banality of evil,” she was writing about Nazi Germany. But the phrase has endured because it’s so adaptable to other totalitarian regimes of our times, most especially the Soviet Union. We were reminded of this last week when it was learned that Morton Sobell, the Cold War spy who had been convicted of espionage along with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, had died in New York the day after Christmas. He was 101.
An engineer and expert in military technology, Sobell was at best a supporting player in the 1951 Rosenberg drama which, along with the trial and conviction of Alger Hiss, was one of the two sensational espionage cases defining the early Cold War. The Rosenbergs and their friend and fellow Communist Sobell had been supplying American industrial and military secrets to the Russians since World War II. But whereas Sobell was found guilty of passing along military information largely used for aerial and artillery weapons, the Rosenbergs had supplied intelligence that accelerated the development of a Soviet atomic bomb.
Accordingly, Sobell was sentenced to 30 years in prison — he was paroled in 1969 — while the Rosenbergs were executed in 1953. Sobell disappeared into prison and was largely forgotten; the Rosenbergs were elevated to the ranks of left-wing martyrdom, where they remain.
And therein lies a tale.
While it has become known, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that Sobell, the Rosenbergs, and Hiss were, in fact, Soviet spies, it was long an article of faith on the progressive Left that all were innocent of the charges against them and prosecuted largely for their political beliefs. Concern about postwar national security was transformed into persecution of radicals and worries about Soviet espionage in the United States, and the global ambitions of Communism, were exaggerated to justify domestic repression in America.
That was the folklore, and for years after Sobell’s release from prison he was happy to promote the idea in public that the Cold War itself, as well as his own prosecution and imprisonment, were symptoms of a phantom Red Scare, a tidal wave of anti-Communist hysteria leading to homegrown tyranny. Neither he nor the Rosenbergs had ever been spies, he insisted, and their sympathy for the Soviet Union was based on admiration for its socialist ideals and the wartime alliance with Moscow in the fight against fascism.
The practical effect was to muddle the distinction between liberalism and radicalism and to render anti-Communism intellectually and politically disreputable. Indeed, so ingrained is this posture in the news media, in the academy, and in popular culture that the stakes and the sobering perils of the Cold War are still regarded by many as trivial.
Which, in 2008, made Sobell’s unexpected apostasy even more shocking — to admirers, at least. In an interview with the New York Times, he reversed a half-century of furious denials and countercharges and admitted he and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been spies — “Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that,” he said — and delivered stolen classified military information to the Russians.
Predictably, Sobell insisted that the weapons systems involved in his own espionage were exclusively “defensive stuff” and had never been used against Americans in the field. But even in this overdue acknowledgment of truth Sobell could not resist deception: Not only did the Rosenberg spy ring contribute to the development of Soviet nuclear weapons and delivery systems, but Sobell’s specialized air-defense weaponry was used with effect against American forces in Korea and Vietnam.
Which brings us back to the banality of evil. Morton Sobell was not, as defenders long maintained, a crusader for world peace, a radical victim, or collateral damage of a Cold War witch hunt. He was an early admirer of one of the great mass murderers of history, Joseph Stalin, and lifelong partisan of a grimly repressive Soviet Union. And cynical too: “I bet on the wrong horse,” he admitted to an interviewer.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at The Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
