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| Morton Sobell, spy |
Sobell was born in New York City to Jewish immigrant parents who arrived in the US in 1906 from a small village in what is today the Ukraine. He graduated from the City College of New York with a degree in engineering.
In 1939 he began working in Washington, D.C. for the Navy Bureau of Ordnance and in 1943 took a job with General Electric which had major defense contracts. According to an NKGB agent, Sobell, a top specialist in his field, was recruited as a spy in the summer of 1944. When approached Sobell readily agreed to spy for the Russians.
In June 1944, Max Elitcher, a prosecution witness in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial in 1951 and a close friend of both Sobell and Rosenberg, claimed he was phoned by Julius Rosenberg who requested a meeting in which Rosenberg tried to recruit Elitcher.
Rosenberg said that many people were aiding the Soviet Union by providing classified information about military equipment and that Morton Sobell was one of them.
After David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg's brother, was arrested on charges of espionage, Sobell and his family fled to Mexico in June of 1950 where they lived under assumed names. On August 16, 1950, Sobell and his family were abducted by armed men, taken to the United States border and turned over to the FBI who arrested him for conspiring with Julius Rosenberg to commit espionage.
Sobell was tried and found guilty and sentenced to 30 years while both the Rosenbergs were executed. Sobell was initially sent to Alcatraz, but was transferred to Lewisburg Penitentiary when Alcatraz closed in 1963. Sobell was released in 1969 after serving 17 years and 9 months.
After his release he became an advocate of progressive causes and conducted public speaking tours regaling audiences with his account of being falsely prosecuted and convicted by the federal government. He also made trips to Vietnam during the war, to East Germany before the fall of the Soviet Union and to Cuba. In 1974, he published a memoir, On Doing Time, in which he maintained that he was innocent.
Sobell's purported innocence became a cause among progressive intellectuals who organized a Committee to Secure Justice for Morton Sobell. In 1978 the Corporation for Public Broadcasting produced a television special that maintained Sobell was innocent of the government charges. The Monthly Review, an independent Socialist magazine, maintained that the government had presented "absolutely no proof" of Sobell's guilt, but had tried him merely "to give the impression that an extensive spy ring had been in operation."
At the age of 91 Sobell, for the first time, told The New York Times that he had given military secrets to the Soviets during World War II. He claimed he had passed only material about defensive radar and artillery devices. The reporter said that military experts contended that one device Sobell mentioned in the interview was later used against US military aircraft during bothe the Korean and Vietnam wars. Sobell also said that his co-defendant Julius Rosenberg had been involved in spying, but his wife was not. A committed communist, in 2018 he told the Wall Street Journal, "I bet on the wrong horse."
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| Phillips in 1904 |
Phillips was born in Kalvaria, south western Lithuania and came to the United States at the age of 13. After receiving his first degree from the College of the City of New York in 1896, he went on to study law at Columbia University and started to practice in New York City in 1899. In 1907, Phillips became attorney for the New York Taxpayers' Association, and subsequently became legal adviser to other well known organizations.
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| Phillips later in life |
Phillip's career as a chess-master started with his winning the New York Sun chess tournament in 1895. Thereafter he participated in various local, national and international tournaments. Phillips was co-author of the Book of the Warsaw Tournament (1935). For a time he served as chairman of Scripta Methematica, a journal devoted to mathematics and science, and was also a director of Yeshiva College.
In 1942, he won the following game, played in the Metropolitan League match. Phillips played for the Manhattan CC and his opponent for the Bronx-Empire City team.
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