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Yes retro, but we'd got the ***, we'd got them bang to rights, locked up in a small cell. No more information was coming out of them. And I still wonder why we didn't treat them as we treated POWs - for similar reasons, i.e. if you kill OUR spies, we'll kill YOURS, and vice versa. Just lock them up, have 'em back later.
I suspect other answerers have touched on the thinking. Spying is not 'gentlemanly' and they are thus beyond the pale. (Well, it's not gentlemanly when the OTHER side is doing it...)
And my question is slightly broader - why (oh why) did the Yanks kill the Rosenbergs? Is it just that they're even twitchier about spies than us?
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