Here's the NYT article that appeared on the 50th anniversary of the execution.
The available evidence now suggests to historians that Julius Rosenberg did in fact spy for the Soviet Union. The evidence against Ethel Rosenberg, however, is considered flimsy at best. But whatever they may have done, it is far from evident that they had handed Moscow the key to its first atomic bomb, as charged at the time.
The couple remain a special case. The United States has had many spies over the last 50 years, including some believed to have done great harm to American interests. Not one was put to death.
Here's the Wikipedia page:
The Rosenbergs were the only two American civilians to be executed for espionage-related activity during the Cold War. In imposing the death penalty, [Judge Irving] Kaufman noted that he held them responsible not only for espionage but also for the deaths of the Korean War:
“I consider your crime worse than murder...
I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-Bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country. No one can say that we do not live in a constant state of tension. We have evidence of your treachery all around us every day for the civilian defense activities throughout the nation are aimed at preparing us for an atom bomb attack.”
Commenting on the sentence given to them, Julius Rosenberg claimed the case is a political frame-up.
“This death sentence is not surprising. It had to be. There had to be a Rosenberg case, because there had to be an intensification of the hysteria in America to make the Korean War acceptable to the American people. There had to be hysteria and a fear sent through America in order to get increased war budgets. And there had to be a dagger thrust in the heart of the left to tell them that you are no longer gonna get five years for a Smith Act prosecution or one year for contempt of court, but we’re gonna kill ya! ”...
Marxist Nobel Prize-winning existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre called the trial "a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation. By killing the Rosenbergs, you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Magic, witch-hunts, autos-da-fé, sacrifices – we are here getting to the point: your country is sick with fear ... you are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb." Others, including non-Communists such as Jean Cocteau, Albert Einstein and Nobel-Prize-winning physical chemist Harold Urey, as well as Communists or left-leaning artists such as Nelson Algren, Bertolt Brecht, Dashiell Hammett, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, protested the position of the American government in what the French termed America's Dreyfus affair. In May 1951, Pablo Picasso wrote for the communist French newspaper L’Humanité, "The hours count. The minutes count. Do not let this crime against humanity take place." The all-black labor union International Longshoremen’s Association Local 968 stopped working for a day in protest. Cinema artists such as Fritz Lang registered their protest. Pope Pius XII appealed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower to spare the couple, but Eisenhower refused on February 11, 1953, and all other appeals were also unsuccessful.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, investigated how much the Soviet spy ring helped the USSR to build their bomb. In 1945, Moynihan found, physicist Hans Bethe estimated that the Soviets would be able to build their own bomb in five years. “Thanks to information provided by their agents,” Moynihan concluded in his book Secrecy, they did it in four. That was the edge that espionage gave them: one year.”
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That year, under the wrong circumstances, could have been enough.
And note, no charge of treason.
Hooray.
Imagine how many people in today's day and age would be executed? Manning, Snowden, etc. It'd be like Judge Roy Bean's hometown with a hangin' a day.
I notice a few NAZI collaborators and Stalinists in that list of Rosenberg supporters. Reminds me of the list in support of Roman Polanski, it was alphabetical so Woody Allen came first. Ironic in a funny sort of way.
The people who really should have been given the old sparky treatment were ALL of those who swore on a stack of Bibles that the Rosenbergs were innocent and trashed the reputations of everyone who (correctly) argued otherwise. I even wouldn't be against yet going back and arresting and trying all of such loathsome, odious creatures who argued for their innocence and frying--yes FRYING--any still left alive. The damage they did to the civic public square and the influence they had on the LIV types in changing the very nature of our civic culture to collectively look askance at critics of totalitarian communism is incalculable. (I know, dream on..)
The immediate 10 years following the mega destruction and mass inhuman killings done for 10 years by Germans and Japanese seeking world domination was not a good time to get caught giving aide and comfort the next world domination game coming from Stalin's Soviet Russia.
The American leadership back then were stone cold realists.
They saw clearly that Marxist ideals and victim mythology were simply smoke and mirrors for another world wide murder and theft conquest starting in Korea and aimed at taking Europe and Japan.
We also spent the cost of WWII over again to save the Europeans, especially the Greeks and the Turks, from Stalin.
It took another generation of deluded Harvard educated idiots to create one drop of misguided sympathy for those guys.
Incidentally, the stone cold realists back then were Scots-Irish men named Truman and Marshall.
What difference, at this point, does it make?
Notice well in the quotation from Jean Paul Sartre:
By killing the Rosenbergs, you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice.
What "science" exactly is JPS talking about here? Why, Marxism, of course.
Until one studies the history of those years, one simply cannot believe the hold that the flimsiest of economic theories (Marxism) & the flimsiest of psychological theories (Freudianism) held on the minds of the "best & brightest".
Something to bear in mind when the modern Left tells you "we're the party of Science". Such claims are, sadly, built into their DNA, and the results have been ruinous.
"Marxist Nobel Prize-winning ..."
You would think this would be a contradiction in terms in a sane world, and anyone who was a "Marxist Nobel Prize-winning" whatever would not be listened to or consulted for his moral wisdom.
Unfortunately, the world is not sane. Instead, it's gotten crazier in the last 60 years.
In The Black Book of Communism, they put the the total death toll of Communism in the 20th century at around 94 million (and that may even be low), around the same amount as the estimated total deaths attributed to the Black Plague in Eurasia during the 14th - 16th centuries.
Funny thing is that the first Soviet A-bomb was a pretty much straight up copy of the first US device, courtesy of Mr Hans Fuchs & the Rosenburgs. The subsequent bombs were improved versions using Russian technology. But the first one HAD to work (or Stalin would have had the scientist's heads), so they used an older design just to prove they had the goods.
Ethyl may not have been a spy, but she knew what was going on. Her silence in the face of that got her ride with the lightning
The Rosenburg kids and grandkids are still slinking around trying to "prove" their parents were innocent. Kinda like Alger Hiss
The evidence does not "suggest" Rosenburg was guilty, it confirms it.
Such outcry for two lone people being killed by the state when they caused this and other states to kill by the tens of thousands. They simply could have refused to commit the treason, but they didn't. They sacrificed all those lives through betrayal. Yet all the bleeding hearts bleed for those two.
I never understand that mindset, and it's common to all anti-death penalty people. It's a blindness to the victims no matter how many or how heinously they suffered.
"Marxist Nobel Prize-winning ..."
Nazi Humanitarian of the Year Award-winning jouranlist, orator and man of letters, Joseph Goebbels.
Much-loved Catholic Martyr, Saint Benito (Mussolini).
I understand that their major contribution to the Soviet Union was not the A bomb but proximity fuses. Proximity fuses were a quantum jump in anti aircraft defenses. These fuses killed many American airmen in Korea and Vietnam. The U2 pilot, Powers, was shot down by a proximity fuse. The Rosenbergs did not commit a victimless crime.......Julius could have spared his wife's life by admitting to his crimes. Ethel's blood is on his hands, but no one on the left thinks that this is so...... The couple lied up to the moment of their death. Why is no one on the left offended by their lies? Why does the left feel that there is no lesson to be learned from their earnest, heartfelt support of these liars?
I deleted a comment saying that I didn't understand the Moynihan statement. After reading the full sentence (there's a semicolon before the "thanks") on Amazon, I now understand.
It's complete nonsense based on uninformed speculation by Bethe.
I thought Ethel recruited her brother in law David.
@YH/
"...we're the party of Science..."
Yes, ans by asking: "So.... then...you're proud to have Lysenko as your party's titular scientific head?--Good to know."
@William/
"Why is no one on the left offended..."
You poor naive, deluded sap..
William, cont'd.
William, there are some things in this world (that anyone who is over the age of twelve, with an IQ marginally into double-digits and who have lived on this oblate spheroid for, say, a few nano-seconds) that should be intuitively obvious.
Michael makes a good point. Where the data confirms something the author doesn't like, then it merely 'suggests' something. There is clear evidence that Julius Rosenberg was a Soviet agent.
IMO, the death penalty for treason aught to be used more. Aldrich Ames should have been executed. His actions directly lead to people's deaths (Wikipedia lists 5).
NBC had one of their "White Papers" in the 1980s around the time when someone was suing to clear the Rosenburg name. They found one of the scientists that worked with them--both Ethel (in the office) and Julius. The program started off with a reporter asking the scientist how he knew they were guilty and he said "because they told me they were." Apparently the Rosenburgs hosted a Sunday pot luck dinner every week in their quarters, and almost everyone attended. There were lots of bachelors and many of the married men chose not to bring their wives and families to the base. According to the scientist talking, they always discussed politics after the meal. The group consensus was that Stalin would have no choice but to take all of Europe if they didn't have nuclear parity--to deny the US bases to launch bombers. Julius told about contacting the Soviet ambassador on one of his trips to NYC or DC (I don't remember which) with a short handwritten note. They contacted him immediately and made arrangements for a blind drop in a park. Ethyl copied the material and Julius delivered it. They didn't keep any of this from the group as it was happening. Some walked out when Julius talked about contacting the Soviets, and never returned. The guy talking to NBC handled the ethical crisis--he signed an agreement to warn base security if he knew of a breach. He settled on that "knew" part and decided that he didn't "know" anything because he didn't witness the original action.
They were both guilty as charged.
I think the crimes and excesses of imperialism and capitalism have been endlessly documented and dramatized. The fatuity and mendacity of the left have largely escaped the attention of our artists and intellectuals.....I saw a documentary made by one of the Rosenberg grandchildren. No one in her family or circle of friends were ambivalent about the heritage of their grandparents. For God's sake, they were proud of them......There were 1.5 million people executed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The UN has run a tribunal at a cost of $200 million dollars that has to date convicted one person on war crimes. (He was given a jail sentence). The execution of the Rosenbergs caused far more outrage on the left than the mass murder of 1.5 million Cambodians. What's wrong with these people?
They cherry pick at 50 years. We executed German spies in WWII. Why not Soviet ones in WWIII. Only today with the NYT lens back 50 years fron No Death penalty NYC is this a big deal.
William said...
mass murder of 1.5 million Cambodians. What's wrong with these people?
They are Leftists. That's the difference BTW between Joan Baez and Jane Fonda. Jane was/is a communist and opposed Vietnam for political reasons. Joan was in her heart a Quaker and opposed all war. (and I like her music).
The Test comes in 1979, when Joan took out a full page ad in the NYT protesting AGAINST Communist Vietnam for the horrors of the camps and the killings going on in what had been South Vietnam.
There was outrage on the Left at the ad
Baez' experiences regarding Vietnam's human-rights violations ultimately led her to found her own human-rights group in the late 1970s, Humanitas International, whose focus was to target oppression wherever it occurred, criticizing right and left-wing régimes equally.
"Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left" by Ronald Radosh
http://www.amazon.com/Commies-Journey-Through-Left-Leftover/dp/189355452X
You really should read this to get a feel for what it was like growing up within the Leftist cocoon at that time.
Listen, the Rosenbergs were heroes. They let the public know what our government was doing IN SECRET, and don't you know that government secrets are tantamount to fascism?
I thought extreme political positioning was something new.
Simon says, "Listen, the Rosenbergs were heroes. They let the public know what our government was doing IN SECRET, and don't you know that government secrets are tantamount to fascism?"
Actually, the Rosenbergs did not inform the public, unless the government of the then Soviet Union was the public, which I do not think was the case.
Nelson Algren, Bertolt Brecht, Dashiell Hammett, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera
Stalinist, Stalinist, Stalinist, Trotskyite, Trotskyite. Wow, that's a veritable Popular Front right there. Couldn't they find any actual fellow-travelers to leaven that loaf?
Actually, the Rosenbergs did not inform the public, unless the government of the then Soviet Union was the public, which I do not think was the case.
The Party *is* the People, which is identical with the Public, thus - they informed the public.
Ran across this quote from Arthur Koestler today:
"The Party promises only one thing: after the victory, one day when it can do no more harm, the material of the secret archives will be published."
virgil xenophon "The people who really should have been given the old sparky treatment were ALL of those who swore on a stack of Bibles that the Rosenbergs were innocent and trashed the reputations of everyone who (correctly) argued otherwise."
That would be a long list. Not disagreeing with you, just noting that there are a lot of Americans who deserve to get what their socialist heroes gave to so many millions.
I remember Krushchev's memoir (an interesting read, btw) as being even more damning in context, but as I don't have it in front of me, here's an excerpt from the New York Times
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE0DC103FF936A1575AC0A966958260
"From Stalin and from the longtime Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, the memoir says, Khrushchev learned that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had ''provided very significant help in accelerating the production of our atomic bomb.''
''Let this be a worthy tribute to the memory of those people,'' the memoir says of the Rosenbergs. ''Let my words serve as an expression of gratitude to those who sacrificed their lives to a great cause of the Soviet state at a time when the U.S. was using its advantage over our state to blackmail our state and undermine its proletarian cause.''"
Unknown said...
"Actually, the Rosenbergs did not inform the public, unless the government of the then Soviet Union was the public, which I do not think was the case.
Touché, but when the essential claim that I'm mocking is that we should be outraged about the government having secrets for no better reason than that we don't know them, it's a close enough analogy for the satire to work.
I wonder when the Times will come around to admitting Hiss's guilt? Don't hold your breath.
In May 1951, Pablo Picasso wrote for the communist French newspaper L’Humanité...
... from a desk in his massive château in France.
I love Picasso's work, but he was a thoroughgoing hypocritical prick.
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers -- goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me at every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.
I thought it must be the worst thing in the world
Based on the little I've read about the case, it appears to me that the Rosenbergs were relatively small cogs in the Soviet scientific espionage machine. David Greenglass had been at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, and seems to have played a larger role than his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, but he served only 9 1/2 years in prison. Courier Harry Gold seems to have had a lesser role than Greenglass, but was sentenced to 30 years (serving half before being released). Klaus Fuchs, who did the actual spying, received the shortest sentence -- 14 1/2 years -- and served the shortest time -- 9 years and 4 months.
So it comes across to me that the smaller your role in atomic espionage, the worse off you were.
Communism is "in" and Fascism is "out." It's that simple. And who says so? The cool kids. So everyone who wants to be in the cool kids' good graces, and who doesn't? gets it that you don't ever knock communism, socialism, progressivism, liberalism, and you always show abhorrence for fascists, which is to say every single individual or group that resists the collective. Thus pro-choice is cool, pro-life is square. Most, especially most of the socially ambitious want to be cool. In fact they understand the vital importance of never being suspected of harboring even the merest smidgen of squareness or sympathy for the square position. Thus the unending unstoppable advance of the communist horror. It's cool.
@Big Mike,
So it comes across to me that the smaller your role in atomic espionage, the worse off you were.?
Because those guys who you mentioned "turned", and after they were caught & provided evidence to the FBI (especially Greenglass).
The Feds didn't really want to fry anyone. They wouldn't have fried the Rosenbergs (especially Ethyl) if they had played ball. But, no, the Rosenbergs wanted to die as martyrs for the great proletarian cause, and they refused to co-operate with the Feds, even when it was clear that the spy ring had been utterly compromised. In the process they left two sons orphaned.
Well Big Mike you're in a room with black widow spiders and rattlesnakes. You manage to catch and kill the black widows, but don't quite catch the sidewinder Klaus Fuchs.
Because you didn't catch the sidewinder, you can't stomp on the black widow? Give me a break.
I wouldn't let the perfect ever be the enemy of the good. A trifecta with Ethel Julius and Klaus holding hands on top of Old Sparky wasn't available at the time.
I've not lost any sleep over the death of the Rosenbergs. Unlike Bill Ayers who admitted that he "was guilty as sin, but free as a bird", the Rosenbergs were guilty--but they were not free.
Somewhere, sometime, I saw an interview with David Greenglass on TV.
He pretty much comes out and says that his sister, Ethyl Greenglass Rosenberg, was the biggest asshole on the planet for letting herself get executed and orphaning her kids for what was, by that time, basically nothing.
When did America lose the will to give traitors and spies a decent show trial and then execute them? The spectacle of creeps like Major Hassan the Ft. Hood shooter or Zacarias Moussaoui, (just mention two recent examples), dragging the process out for years and years and and making a mockery out our collective notions of justice in the end seems to me to be among the last acts, a confused terminal restlessness, and the death throes of a sick society that is nearing the end of its existence.
Moynihan and even Bethe are full of shit. Both were speaking ex post facto, which is always suspect, both were speaking only of the technical challenges and ignored the more relevant political factors, and both wildly overestimated the probability of anybody's success in the first place -- heck, the entire scientific and political establishment wildly overestimated the probability that Nazi Germany could build a bomb, and this was the raison d'etre of the Manhattan Engineering Project.
Any idiot knowing a little about nuclear weapons understands that in 1941 the challenges to producing a weapon were in small part engineering, but mostly industrial, economic and political. Indeed, it was on the latter grounds that Heisenberg (head of Nazi atomic research) declined to press forward with a bomb project. He (correctly) decided that wartime Germany simply didn't have the industrial plant to do the job before the war ended. The reason the Americans got there first is because they had the available industrial capacity, the wealth to foot the bill, and the political will to push it forward.
Now turn to the Soviets. What is clear from public resources on the post-war Soviet scientific establishment is that its course was utterly dominated by Stalin's paranoia. Building a bomb takes a long time. Success on the first try is not easily guaranteed. You tie up a lot of precious industrial resources, for which the USSR was badly hurting. If you fail, or if you look at all politically unreliable, you are going to get a bullet in the back of the head. And Stalin was inherently very suspicious of eggheads, and tech he didn't personally understand. (There is an excellent reason Stalin put Beria, the Lubyanka monster, in charge of the bomb project. Reason #1 was to keep the scientists scared shitless.)
The only reason enough physicists were willing to propose to Uncle Joe a bomb project was because their possession of first-rate technical espionage contributed by the Rosenbergs convinced them they could almost guarantee success on the first shot.
And the only reason Stalin was willing to let them try was because he, too, was convinced they had enough technical data that it would work and work promptly.
It is barely conceivable that in the absence of the high-quality information the Rosenbergs helped deliver there might have been a bomb project in the USSR. But it very likely would have not shown signs of success fast enough to keep Stalin's paranoia at bay. They would simply not have had enough time before Stalin sent half of them to the camps, shot a dozen of the leaders, and dispersed them all to more conventional weapons areas (radar, jets, missiles). In which case, there is every reason to think the Soviet bomb project would not have really gotten going until Stalin's death in 1953. For political reasons, not scientific or technical.
That's not five years, that's more like 10 or 15. That prevents the Korean War from having the nuclear standoff angle, with God knows what consequences. That even might have prevented the terrible drive to build The Super (thermonuclear weapons) that came about after the Soviet A-bomb test in 1949. Without Stalin on the other side, maybe fears might have eased enough to delay that horror indefinitely, the way we have delayed bioweapons.
The Rosenbergs were mass murderers, indirectly, in addition to being personally repugnant, antisocial narcissists both, who willingly died for their moment in the headlines.
Not only that, but their folly brought such panic to the United States public that it engendered a decade or more of subsequent Red scare, which did huge damage to their own best friends on the pacific left. They were selfish betrayers of their own cause, too. A more despicable pair it is hard to imagine.
And the reason Snowden is not a modern Rosenberg? Because he's not telling the terrorists how to avoid the NSA, or duplicate the NSA's ability to gather useful intelligence to research, say, prospective targets for terrorism.
Snowden is more comparable to a person who might have revealed to the Soviets the existence of Venona, or the Corona spy satellites and their full capabilities.
There's no doubt that would be treated with deep skepticism and alarm. And maybe he'd rightly be executed for treason -- it's hard to say, since a Cold War against an indentifiable national aggressor isn't the same as some vague "War" on Terrorism with no defined target or even endpoint goal.
Nevertheless, back in the day when people studied this stuff seriously, there was, for what it's worth, a consensus among both MADmen and peaceniks that revealing to the enemy just how well you can spy on him (but not necessarily revealing how) is actually a very good idea. It stabilizes and deters. That is, some kinds of strategic secrecy serve genuine national security interests, and others work against it, and serve only to ease the lives of lazy politicians and administrators (or provide cover for corrupt bastards).
In the present context, the argument would go that if the NSA openly said how well it could spy on the plans of terrorists, it would, yes, possibly provoke the most dedicated cases into hardening their approach, but it would have dissuaded the less dedicated cases from trying at all. Since by definition there are always more of the latter than the former, and since it is arguable that the former can be prevented by anything at all short of a police state, it might well be you end up reducing terrorism on the whole.
Who knows if this argument has merit? It does depend on terrorists, or their masters and assistants, being in some sense rational actors, and having alternate avenues of pursuing their goals -- both of which are routinely denied, but both of which are a priori not implausible. Still, it's an argument that should be considered, and the only reason it's not is because in truth we fear terrorists less than we feared the Soviets, and so we simply spend less time formulating a nuanced and thoughtful response. We let sloganeering and instinct make our decisions.
"...is that we should be outraged about the government having secrets for no better reason than that we don't know them, it's a close enough analogy for the satire to work."
You misunderstand the outrage, Simon.
The Rosenbergs should have published their material in 'The Guardian'.
Big Mike,
David Greenglass cooperated and had a hand in building evidence against them, including being induced to lie by the FBI. Juliane Rosenbergs' biggest contribution to the Soviets was his turning over the proximity fuse to them.
Fuchs was prosecuted by the British. I think the British being responsible for that major hole had something to do with them going light on on him as not to reflect bad on themselves. In Leslie Groves' book 'Now it Can Be Told' he lets his disgust with the British be known. The Brits had a sharing agreement that preceded the Us/British one with the French that the British did not disclose and continued to honor.
Carl a numbers of years ago I read an account of the Soviet A-Bomb from a Soviet perspective. The conclusion was not that the Rosenberg's spying was the crucial; the Soviet scientists had comparable designs but the value was that it confirmed what they already knew. That saved them some time. Ironically Beria was suspicious of the information received from the various spies. He thought it might have been a very clever disinformation campaign and thus ironically delaying the Soviets for a little bit of since to keep Beria from punishing the scientist they had to redo a lot of the work for test purposes even though they knew it was correct.
LarsPorsena,
What Constitutional violation was occurring in the building of the atom bomb?
Ethel is Ethel. If she was Ethyl she would've gone out with a big bang.
Los Alamos leaked like a sieve, possibly 4 different operations passing info to the reds. How could this be possible without higher up US approval?
David Greenglass still lives, apparently. He done in old Ethel to save his hideously ugly wife.
@ampersand,
Oooops!
If Ethel was Ethyl I guess they would have snuffed her in the gas chamber, eh?
zefal said...
"What Constitutional violation was occurring in the building of the atom bomb?"
What Constitutional violation was occurring in the NSA program? You'd better have a better answer than "the fourth amendment."
Tim said...
"You misunderstand the outrage, Simon."
I understand it perfectly well—I just know enough to know how stupid, misplaced, and, in many cases, opportunistic it is.
Two dumb commies who died for their faux religion. Traitors who were more then happy to see Americans killed in Korea if it advanced Communism. As stated earlier, they could have cooperated, but decided to die instead.
I await the "XX Anniversary" New York Times story on some of famous clerics killed by Communists in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Does anyone else get tired at the Left's double-think and bizarre double standards.
Nazi Concentration Camps - The Greatest Tragedy Ever. Soviet Concentration Camps - Hey, what about that Dodger game?
Very well said, Carl.
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