Guilty

In a federal courtroom in Manhattan last week, three Americans--two men and a woman--were found guilty of transmitting their country's most precious wartime secrets, including the key to the Abomb, to Soviet Russia.

The jury that judged them spent seven hours and 42 minutes deliberating the sordid record of how the A-bomb--and such other secrets as the proximity fuse--were handed over to the Kremlin. To help them decide, the jurors had the testimony of sallow, penitent Harry Gold, a Philadelphia biochemist now serving 30 years because he was a courier for the atomic spy ring, and David Greenglass, a former Los Alamos technician who testified not only to his own but also to his sister's and his wife's parts in the espionage operations.

The convicted:

P: Julius Rosenberg, 32, electrical engineer, who got all his education (College of the City of New York) at public expense, was coordinator for the spy ring--a highly placed figure who recruited men like Greenglass and dealt with the ring's big boss, Soviet Vice Consul Anatoli Yakovlev. Yakovlev fled home to Russia in 1946.

P: Ethel Rosenberg, wife of Julius and sister of confessed Spy David Greenglass. A short, plump woman of 35, she lived with Julius and their two sons in a grubby, $51-a-month apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side and helped Julius collect and record vital espionage data.

P: Morton Sobell, 33, college classmate of Rosenberg and an electronics research worker for the Government in World War II. He was the only one of the defendants to flee the U.S. (to Mexico) after the arrests of British Physicist Klaus Fuchs and Courier Harry Gold broke up the ring in 1950.

After the verdict, the three were locked up, to be sentenced this week.

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