FIGHEING: for elementary jus-

tice and freedom for her hus-
band, Morton Sobell, the story
Mrs. Helen Sobell told to a Van-
couver audience during her
recent visit to this city is like
a nightmare of horror, all the
more so because it happened
next door to every Canadian
citizen,

~ When Hitler’s regime had par-

aded its corps of “witnesses”’
into a Leipzig court in 1933, in-
eluding top “ministers” like Her-
mann Goering and Joseph Goeb-
bels, in an effort to deliver
the Bulgarian Communist lead-
er Georgi Dimitrov over to the
executioner, Dimitrov. quietly
observed that “. .. it is unfortun-
ate for the government that
most of its witneses are per-
jurers, ex-convicts, degenerates
and drug addicts.”

Dimitrov, by his courage at
that trial, inspired a whole
world. The truth he spoke
emerged victorious over false-
hood and brute force, and he
lived to see Hitler’s mon-
strous regime buried in the ruin
it brought to Germany.

There have been many such
cases to show that just so soon
as any state violates ,all the
canons of justice, truth and
decency in the judicial treat-

ment of its citizens, the event -

is no longer the private con-
cern of that state, but of the
whole world.

*

The Morton Sobell story is
one of those cases. It opened
with a savage brutality remin-

mh

‘Confession’ of a crime he did not commit would free Morton Sobell
- but he affirms his innocence while his wife campaigns to clear him

iscent of Hitler’s Germany, only
this time the Pentagon instead
of the Wilhelmstrasse set the
stage.

Mrs. Sobell told of her little
tamily holidaying in Mexico,
being “visited” after midnight
by five armed police thugs and
of her husband being clubbed
down by a rifle butt because he
protested: the invasion of his
home.

Insisting on seeing and being
with her husband, Helen Sobel,
her arms pinioned behind her
back, is thrown into a police
room marked “homicide” and
there she sees her husband,
father of their two small child-
ren, covered with bruises and
blood. He speaks a word to en-
courage his brave little wife,
and is clubbed down again be-
fore her eyes, then tossed into a
car heading for the U.S. border,
with his escort instructed to
“shoot . . . if he makes one
move.”

Then the scene changes to
the Federal Bureau of Investi-
gation in the “enlightened”
United States of America. The
FBI wants to add Helen Sobell’s
name to its list of perjurers. In
reply to her repeated protests
that she and her husband have
committed no crime, the FBI
men tell her, “You will be sur-
prised how much you'll remem-
ber when you work with us.”

Then the “trial’’ before the

notorious Judge Irving Kauf-

man, who sent Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg to the electric chair,
the judge who said he could
“not be moved by hysteria” but
“whose shameful sentences upon

the Rosenbergs and upon Morton
Sobell were and are the very
essence of. mob hysteria and
cold war mania. Again the par-
rade of professional stool
pigeons, well rehearsed by the
FBI, Elizabeth Bentley, Harry
Gold, Max Elixer, each weav-
ing parts of a net of perjury to
enmesh another victim for the
altar of Pentagon atomania.

Kaufman, in passing sentence,
tells Sobell that “there is no
evidence of atom bomb espion-
age in your case... but I must
do my duty ... 30 years im-
prisonment.”

Courageously Helen Sobell
tells the story of this nightmare.
In prison they offer Morton
Sobell his “freedom” in ex-
change for a “confession” of
something the court didn’t even
prove he did. Sobell refuses to
engage in such perjury, so all
his “privileges” are taken away
Anonymous
Him, slandering his wife, his
family, his friends, letters of
innuendo and invective, written
by FBI stooges to destroy the
spirit of a brave American.

As in the Rosenberg case, such
a “confession” is sorely needed
by the U.S. Department of Jus-
tice and its FBI to exonerate

By TOM McEWEN-

letters are sent:

the U.S. government in the eyes

_ of outraged world opinion. And

as in the Rosenberg case, the
hope is vain. Not even his re-
moval to the “Devil’s Island” of
Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay,

can break the spirit of Morton.

Sobell, nor of his brave wife,
Helen.

“We are proud” she told her °

audience, “because we have
neither betrayed our friends nor
our country ... proud because
our anger sustains us against
this tyranny. which threatens
every citizen.”

> 4 \

: Two great books recently pub-
lished in the U.S., John Wexley’s
The Judgement of Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg, and William
Reuben’s The Atom Spy Hoax,
together with the ex-FBI stooge
Harvey Matusow’s False Wit-
ness, tells the whole story of an
American people. Helen Sobell’s
heart rending story brings it
down to family level—and grips
the heart of a nation seeking
justice for a citizen.

At a recent meeting in Car-
negie Hall, New York, Senator
Langer declared to Helen Sobell,
“T will do all in my power as
a member of the Senate Judici-
ary Committee to bring your
husband back to you,” and War-
ren K. Billings, imprisoned for
20 years in the Tom Mooney
“Preparedness Day” frameup
declared from the same plat-

A woman cries for justice

form, “I was the Morton Sobell
in the Tom Mooney case.” The
people of the United States, says
Helen Sobell, “are tired of being
afraid, are tired of being silent.”

The meeting in Vancouver en-
dorsed the following resolution
which will be sent to the U.S.
government and U.S. Consulates
in this country:

“There is a new spirit of peace
and friendship in the world to-
day which is welcomed by all
people.

“We feel that to keep Morton
Sobell in prison is to continue
the feat and hysteria which has
characterized a recent period of
world history.

“To release Morton Sobell
would be an act of humanity
and goodwill which would be
in keeping with the new spirit
abroad in the world.

“In the meantime, to trans-
fer him from Alcatraz to a
prison on the east coast of the
United States, where he would
be able to consult with his
attorneys and have visits from
his family, would seeme to be
the least that could be done.

“A new trial to resolve the
many and grave doubts that
justice has been done in this
case is a pressing necessity.”

A nation-wide campaign 1s
now under way to bring the
Sobell case into the courts again,
this time on a motion that “the
kncwn use of perjury was part
of Sobell persecution.” Helen
Sobell concluded her dramatic
appeal to all lovers of democra-
cy and justice by asking “in
the name of humanity and jus-
tice help us, and we will repay
your helo with our faith and
love all the days of our lives.”

Eighty years ago they used oxen on Granville Street

fisuty years ago, when this

Picture was taken, cedar and’

fir still grew on ‘what is now
Granville Street south of Rob-

Son ‘and pioneer loggers used
©Xen to haul out their logs.

Granville Street itself began
8S a small creek winding

through the forest and tumbling
into Burrard Inlet through the
ravine it had cut for itself in
the bluff overlooking what are
now the CPR yards. In a sense,
the creek determined the loca-

tion of Vancouver’s most fam-
ous street, renowned through-
out the world for its neon lights.

CPR surveyors, looking for a
site that offered space for a
railway station and deep water
for ship docks, chose the spot
where the stream had cut the
bluffs.

In 1875, pioneer residents of
the infant city. crossed the
swamp around Granville and

‘walk mounted on stilts.

Dunsmuir on a wooden side-
The
edge of the forest then was
never far away.

Beyond Robson, loggers slow-
ly pushed the forest back to the
shores of False Creek, then a
pleasant place indeed, its wat-
ers teeming with fish and wild-

fowl. In those days the water
came almost up to what is now
Pender Street, reached far up
into Grandview over the flats
where the Canadian National
and Great Northern now run
and provided the early resi- :
dents of Mount Pleasant with
a vista worthy of thy name they
bestowed upon it.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — DECEMBER 9, 1955 — PAGE §