Guilty

Arrested in their Manhattan apartment on charges of spying for Russia, Lithuanian-born Jack Soble and his wife Myra replied "not guilty" when a clerk at the federal courthouse last February asked them how they pleaded. Last week, pale, haggard but looking strangely relaxed, the Sobles switched their plea to guilty on a count of conspiring with Soviet agents to "receive and obtain" U.S. defense secrets. Maximum sentence: $10,000 fine and ten years' imprisonment.

In the two-month interval, a lot had happened to Jack Soble, 53, and his Russian-born wife, 53 (TIME, Feb. 4). They found out that while they were spying, the FBI had been on their trail. And when they faced the prospect that the Justice Department's case against them might well be unbeatable, they had to face up to the grim fact that in 1954 Congress raised the maximum penalty for peace time espionage from 20 years' imprisonment to death.

Last Chance. The guilty plea on the lesser charge of receiving and obtaining secrets indicated that the Sobles had made a deal for their lives. Probable deal: the U.S. Government would drop the death-penalty charge of conspiracy to "communicate, deliver and transmit" defense secrets to Soviet agents if the Sobles would tell all.

There was, it seemed, plenty to tell. The Sobles, said their lawyer, are "two anguished individuals" manipulated by "the long arm of Russia" and "suffering intensely from experiences they had gone through before they emigrated to this country and since." Jack Soble, also known as Peter, Abram and, in earlier years, Abromas Sobolevicius, arrived in the U.S. in 1941 by way of Japan. He and Myra became U.S. citizens in 1947. Soble worked as a dealer in animal hair and bristles, but behind his fac,ade of respectability, the U.S. charged, he served the Kremlin as a spymaster in a ring that operated in the U.S. and Europe for more than a decade. Among the spies working under him in the U.S., charged Justice, was an immigrant named Jacob Albam, who came from Soble's home town of Vilkaviskis, Lithuania. Arrested in Manhattan the same morning the FBI closed in on the Sobles, Albam, 64, was still clinging to his not-guilty plea last week, but he, too, seemed on the verge of deciding to change his mind.

Next Questions. The most improbable conspirator in the Soble ring was a roly-poly, harmless looking mystery man named Boris Morros, who used to be well known in Hollywood and Manhattan as musical director of Paramount Pictures, and later as a movie producer (Tales of Manhattan, Carnegie Hall). Over the past decade or so, Russian-born Boris Morros had little to do with moviemaking, spent much of his time in Europe. Just what he was up to was a puzzle to his old Hollywood acquaintances. Shortly after the FBI nabbed the Sobles, the Justice Department identified Morros as its star witness. There were strong hints that Morros had been serving as a U.S. secret agent while operating inside the conspiracy as a trusted courier.

Far from closing the case, the Sobles' admission that they had obtained U.S. defense secrets raised more questions: Who gave them the secrets? To whom were they passed? Presumably, behind the locked and guarded doors of a grand-jury chamber in Manhattan, Jack and Myra Soble were singing the answers.

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