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 More than six decades later, the prosecution of Ethel Rosenberg remains one of America’s most controversial criminal cases: Her conviction — and eventual execution — for joining in her husband Julius’s espionage conspiracy rested largely on trial testimony from her younger brother. 
 
 But in private testimony to a grand jury seven months before the 1951 trial, Mrs. Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, never mentioned involvement by his sister in Mr. Rosenberg’s delivery of atomic secrets to Soviet operatives, according to a grand jury transcript released Wednesday. 
 
 While not definitive proof that he lied at trial, Mr. Greenglass’s omission — and his assertion before the grand jury that he had never even discussed espionage with his sister — provides further evidence to Mrs. Rosenberg’s defenders who believe that she was unfairly convicted, and that her brother, under pressure from prosecutors, had doomed her with concocted testimony to spare his own wife from prosecution. 
 
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 At the trial, Mr. Greenglass, who had been an Army machinist assigned to Los Alamos, N.M., where the atomic bomb was developed, testified that in September 1945 he had delivered bomb secrets to his brother-in-law in the Rosenbergs’ Lower East Side apartment. There, he said, his sister typed his handwritten notes for delivery to the Russians. 
 
 Summing up his case at the end of the trial, the prosecutor said Mrs. Rosenberg had “struck the keys, blow by blow, against her own country in the interests of the Soviets.” 
 
 Years later, Mr. Greenglass, who served almost a decade in prison for his role as a spy, acknowledged that in 1951 he could not recall who had typed the notes, and that he actually thought his wife had, but when she remembered shortly before the trial that it was Mrs. Rosenberg, he was not going to disagree. 
 
 The 46-page transcript of Mr. Greenglass’s Aug. 7, 1950, grand jury testimony did not include any mention of the typing, nor even of the September 1945 meeting in the Rosenbergs’ apartment. 
 
 That his grand jury answers would not jibe with his riveting trial testimony was not unexpected. But in light of what he testified to at the trial, the extent to which he shielded his sister before the grand jury was surprising. 
 
 Referring to a silver Omega watch and commendation that Mr. Rosenberg was given by the Soviets, an assistant United States attorney, Myles Lane, asked whether Mrs. Rosenberg ever received any similar gratuity. 
 
 “My sister has never spoken to me about this subject,” Mr. Greenglass replied. 
 
 Asked whether Mrs. Rosenberg, like her husband, had urged him to remain in the Army after World War II so he could continue spying for the Soviets, Mr. Greenglass answered broadly: “I said before, and say it again, honestly, this is a fact: I never spoke to my sister about this at all.” 
 
 The Rosenbergs were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage — the government claimed they had stolen the secret to the atomic bomb and all but set off the Korean War — and were executed at Sing Sing in 1953. Mr. Greenglass’s wife, Ruth, an admitted courier and go-between, was not charged. 
 
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 Mr. Greenglass’s grand jury testimony about his sister does not necessarily contradict his trial testimony, as it has no mention of typing, but it might have undermined his credibility had it been available to defense lawyers at the time. 
 
 In response to a suit by the National Security Archive, historians and journalists, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court in Manhattan released the testimony of most of the Rosenberg grand jury witnesses in 2008, except for those who were still living. 
 
 Mr. Greenglass, who was released from prison in 1960, died last year. Over the objections of his family and the government, the judge ordered in May that his testimony be made public. 
 
 “This revelation points to perjury on the stand by David Greenglass,” said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, an independent group that focuses on transparency. 
 
 David C. Vladeck, the lawyer who argued for the release of the transcripts, said the Greenglass testimony “underscores the likelihood that the testimony used to convict Ethel Rosenberg was, as David Greenglass later admitted, cooked up right before trial. 
 
 “If that’s so, and it appears to be, that is a tragic commentary on the 1950s-era Justice Department.” 
 
 Michael and Robert Meeropol, the Rosenbergs’ sons, acknowledge that their father was legally guilty of the actual charge lodged against him, which was conspiracy, not overt espionage. But they maintain that he, much less their mother, did not deserve to be executed and that the government charged her largely as leverage to persuade their father to confess. 
 
 “It’s not 100 percent proof that the September espionage meeting never took place, but it’s a strong indication that it didn’t,” Robert Meeropol said Wednesday. 
 
 While the Rosenbergs were charged with conspiracy — not overt spying — an aggressive defense lawyer might have wielded Mr. Greenglass’s grand jury testimony to poke holes in the prosecutor’s case. 
 
 The grand jury testimony suggested that Julius Rosenberg had been thoroughly briefed about the bomb by the Soviets so that he would know what information to find, and that Mr. Greenglass later filled in some gaps. 
 
 Asked to recall his conversation with Harry Gold, the Soviet courier who met him in Albuquerque in June 1945, Mr. Greenglass neglected to mention the incriminating quote from Mr. Gold he testified to at the trial: “I come from Julius.” 
 
 His testimony also suggests obliviousness to the consequences of stealing atomic secrets. Asked whether Mr. Rosenberg was worried about being arrested, Mr. Greenglass replied: “Well, he wasn’t worried about that, because this atomic information I gave to him was small compared to the information he was getting from other sources.” 
 
 And, he recalled, when Mr. Rosenberg advised him to hire a lawyer, “My wife and I said, ‘Why should we?’” Instead of fleeing the country, as Mr. Rosenberg suggested, Mr. Greenglass said they intended to escape to the Catskills for the summer. ||||| Julius Rosenberg, right, 34-year-old electrical engineer, and his wife, Ethel, left, 35, arrive at Federal Courthouse in New York City in 1951. | AP Photo Unsealed 1950 testimony minimizes Ethel Rosenberg's spying role 
 
 Newly unsealed testimony from Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, minimizes her role in the spying operations of her husband, Julius Rosenberg, furthering public incredulity about her actual guilt and subsequent execution. 
 
 In the newly released 1950 grand jury testimony, Greenglass said definitively, “I never spoke to my sister about this at all,” when asked about her knowledge of his spying operations, which involved relaying information from Los Alamos laboratories in New Mexico to Julius Rosenberg in New York. 
 
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 The statement contradicts Greenglass’ testimony from the couple’s trial in 1951, when he accused his sister of typing secret information for her husband in his presence. 
 
 The chief prosecutor, Irving Saypol, used Greenglass’ remarks to implicate Ethel Rosenberg, saying that on the day in question, as “on countless other occasions, [Ethel Rosenberg] sat at that typewriter and struck the keys, blow by blow, against her own country in the interests of the Soviets.” 
 
 Still, other parts of the testimony released Wednesday, if true, indicate that Ethel Rosenberg did indeed know intimate details about her husband’s spying operations and that she was present during a number of key meetings. 
 
 In the grand jury testimony from 1950 released Wednesday, Greenglass said that his sister and brother-in-law persuaded him to join the Young Communist League when he was 16 in 1938. 
 
 Also Greenglass said that Ethel Rosenberg was present at a meeting with Julius Rosenberg and Ann Sidorovich in New York City. Sidorovich’s husband, Michael, was a longtime friend of Julius Rosenberg and during the meeting, according to Greenglass, he proposed sending her to New Mexico to serve as a courier. 
 
 Sidorovich denied any involvement in her own testimony and was not charged. 
 
 Both Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were found guilty and sentenced to death. They were executed by electric chair at Sing Sing prison in 1953. 
 
 The Rosenberg’s saga simmered for decades following their deaths but resurfaced when subsequent reporting by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton for a 1983 book, “The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth,” led to the conclusion that Ethel Rosenberg had not played as prominent a role in the spying as originally believed. 
 
 The New York Times’ Sam Roberts subsequently spent more than a decade tracking down Greenglass and interviewed him for 50 hours. He released his own book, “The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case,” in 2001. 
 
 Greenglass told Roberts that he had lied about his sister typing for her husband in order to corroborate testimony his wife, Ruth Greenglass, had given about Ethel Rosenberg typing. 
 
 “I don’t remember that at all,” Greenglass told Roberts. “I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don’t remember.” 
 
 “My wife is more important to me than my sister. Or my mother or my father, OK? And she was the mother of my children.” 
 
 Later interviews and reporting have led to a consensus that information about the atomic bomb given to the Soviet Union by Julius Rosenberg and David Greenglass did not, in fact, substantially help it build its own bomb. 
 
 After the trial Greenglass was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for passing intelligence to Julius Rosenberg during his time as an Army mechanist in Los Alamos, working for scientists integral to the Manhattan Project. 
 
 He ultimately served nine and a half years before returning to his wife and children in New York City, where they lived until she died in 2008 and he died in 2014. 
 
 The testimony released Wednesday was the result of a court order from May of this year that ordered the release because Greenglass and two others whose testimonies were withheld are now dead.
– The newly released 1950 grand jury testimony of David Greenglass, who helped cement the executions of his brother-in-law and sister Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, offers new evidence that Ethel was innocent in the most intense spying case of the Cold War. Both Rosenbergs were convicted of conspiring to steal atomic secrets for the Soviet Union in 1951 after Greenglass said he saw Ethel transcribing information he gave the Rosenbergs—gained while serving as an Army machinist at the Manhattan Project HQ—on a typewriter in 1945. Both Rosenbergs were sent to the electric chair in 1953, though Greenglass, who spent almost 10 years in prison as a co-conspirator, later admitted he lied. In the 46-page transcript of testimony given six months before Greenglass implicated Ethel, her brother said he never spoke about the data with Ethel, only with Julius and his own wife, Ruth, reports the Guardian. Greenglass' testimony, ordered released after his death last year and unsealed yesterday, doesn't disprove his later claim, reports the New York Times. He actually noted Ethel was present at key meetings, reports Politico. However, after he described Julius receiving a silver Omega watch from Russian agents and was asked if Ethel ever mentioned commendations, he said, "My sister has never spoken to me about this subject." He said Julius discussed Greenglass staying in the Army to pass on more information, but added, "Honestly, this is a fact: I never spoke to my sister about this at all." "There was never really any solid evidence that she had been involved in any part of espionage," says an author on the subject. "It just confirms this idea that the government was using her, imprisoning her to get at Julius Rosenberg." Some say it was Ruth Greenglass who typed notes for Julius to forward to the Soviets, and her husband lied to protect her.