ESPIONAGE: Detour

Morton Sobell's "vacation" trip was sudden, indeed. He locked up his house in Flushing, N.Y. one day in June, left a brand-new 1950 Buick in the garage. Without even telling his employers that he was leaving, he bundled his wife, their two children and himself into a commercial airliner, and flew to Mexico City.

Apparently Sobell planned to travel much farther—perhaps to Russia. But last week his travel plans were altered. Picked up on a deportation order, he was whisked across the border before dawn one morning by a mysterious convoy of Mexican secret service agents and deposited at the U.S. border station in Laredo, Texas. There, dumpy, dark-eyed Morton Sobell, 33, his black hair disheveled and his undershirt ballooning from his trousers, was arrested by waiting agents of the FBI as a spy for the Soviet Union.

A native New Yorker of Russian descent, Sobell went to C.C.N.Y., where he became a classmate and close friend of Julius Rosenberg, accused of being a top spy in the atom ring (TIME, July 31). Engineer Sobell worked on top-secret U.S. radar and electronic devices for the Navy from 1942 to 1947, was working on more top-secret Government devices at Manhattan's Reeves Instrument Orp. until his sudden trip south. He was described by a fellow employee at Reeves as "the genius type," a man who could carry plenty of complex data in his head. Sobell was the eighth U.S. citizen arrested on spy charges since British Physicist Klaus Fuchs began spilling what he knew of the busy Soviet espionage ring in the U.S.