Denying Espionage to the Grave

Miriam Moskowitz is expected to be at U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday, to hear if the court will rule in favor of her petition to reverse a verdict against her in 1950. At that time, she and her employer, Abraham Brothman, were found guilty of obstructing justice during an investigation of Soviet espionage. She served two years in the Woman’s Reformatory in Alderson, W.Va., and paid a $10,000 fine.

Ms. Moskowitz has been getting a lot of publicity the past few weeks, including a sympathetic article in the Los Angeles Times and an interview on National Public Radio that cast her as another victim of McCarthyism.

Ms. Moskowitz undoubtedly is receiving sympathy because she is 98 years old and claims to have suffered from a lifetime of FBI surveillance. She says she only wants to undo a great injustice so she can die in peace and not as a felon.

The problem is that Ms. Moskowitz is suffering from what might be termed Alger Hiss syndrome, in which those who were secretly Communist Party members and guilty of aiding the Soviet Union in obtaining classified secrets proclaim their innocence to their dying days. Ms. Moskowitz also wants, as one media story put it, “to remind Americans of the horrors of the Red Scare.” Actually, this may be a good moment to remind Americans that there were real Communists in the U.S., and that many were loyal to the Soviet Union.

The evidence indicates that Ms. Moskowitz was guilty of conspiring to hide facts about espionage from a grand jury in 1947. Here are the facts...