To the Editor:

Francis Fukuyama's essay criticizing "The American Way of Secrecy" (Oct. 8) deserves attention, and action. The need for a Congress to curb executive power abuse has never been greater [than today]. But one sentence of his needs correction, which can in fact come only from the governmental openness that Fukuyama calls for: he writes that the Venona intercepts "proved that Julius Rosenberg was guilty of atomic espionage, and that Whittaker Chambers's charges that Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent were correct."

This is not true. None of the passages in the Venona papers that have been interpreted as applying to Hiss and the Rosenbergs "prove" anything; none have been corroborated by any documents released by post-Soviet Russia: only vague, third-hand reconstructions, by less than reputable characters like Alexander Feklisov and Alexander Vassiliev. Feklisov claimed to have "handled" Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobell--who never heard of him--but produced no hard evidence. Vassiliev sued (for libel, in Britain) John Lowenthal, who had questioned his [reliability regarding] statements about Hiss--and lost. There are still thousands of pages of documents that could be exculpatory, which [the governments in] Washington and Moscow have refused to release.

At the Center for Cryptologic History Symposium last year [10/27/05], John Schindler, a former analyst for the National Security Agency, conceded that "Hiss's status vis-à-vis Soviet intelligence will remain the topic of debate in scholarly and journalistic circles" for years [to come--see johnearlhaynes.org/page61.html]. That's because, as Robert Meeropol (younger son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg) has said of the Bush administration's approach to the freedom of Information Act: "The policy is 'Just say No.'"

Until that changes, or the administration changes, our country will remain, as the late Marshall Perlin (the Meeropols' attorney) said, the only one that has not yet exonerated Alger Hiss and Julius & Ethel Rosenberg--who, to their dying days, proclaimed their innocence of the crimes for which they were convicted.

[Dr.] Leonard J. Lehrman
& Richard Corey
The writers are the [co-]directors of the National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case.