Courts and bug product

[Ian Batten]

On 17 Feb 2008, at 10:35, Nicholas Bohm wrote:

>
> In the case of the Portland spy ring, Lonsdale and the Krogers (to  
> use the names they used as spies) were all foreigners, were quite  
> possibly in the UK illegally (I'm too idle to check), and were all  
> prosecuted here under the Official Secrets Act.  (They were  
> subsequently exchanged for Britons convicted abroad of spying, which  
> feels different from deportation.)

Just looked them up, in the only book I have to hand on the topic, Tom  
Bowyer's biography of Dick White.  According to that, the existence of  
Lambda 1 and Lambda 2, later identified as Harry Houghton and George  
Blake, was revealed by Michael Goleniewski, a CIA source in Polish  
military intelligence.

Houghton was identified by surveillance (which might today end up in  
court) but ``...in a skilful operation, on 7 January 1961, Charles  
Elwell of MI5 orchestrated the arrest in London of [Gordon]  Lonsdale  
[[ Kolon Molodni, a KGB illegal ]] and Houghton while in the act of  
exchanging secret documents and money.''   If you catch a cleared  
employee in a secret establishment exchanging money and documents with  
a KGB illegal, you don't need to bring the surveillance which allowed  
you to find them to court: the act is evidence enough, surely?

I can't put my hand to the book I have somewhere in the chaos upstairs  
which has the Kroger story in it, but from memory they were Morris and  
Lona Cohen, American communists who had fled after the exposure of the  
Rosenbergs and were pretending to be New Zealanders.  They had in  
their house a radio, signal plans, one time pads and the rest of the  
toys of the trade.  They were linked to Houghton and Molodni/Lonsdale  
by surveillance, but the evidence they were prosecuted with stood  
alone (certainly by the standards of the time): their house was  
searched and contained evidence sufficient for the court.

Blake, Lambda 2, an SIS employee, was interrogated by Harold Shergold,  
Terrence Lecky and Ben Johnson on the basis of a files trawl for  
agents meeting the description and history of Lambda Two.  In the  
process of that wrote out a confession.  Perhaps today you might need  
to bolster that with evidence, but back then a confession would have  
been enough.

My point is that the spy cases of the 50s and 60s wouldn't have needed  
surveillance evidence in order to secure a conviction: although they  
were found by surveillance, there was ample evidence to convict and  
there would, both then and now, have been no difficulty in keeping the  
initial information from agents in hostile intelligence agencies from  
a jury.  It's possible that today a judge would want to see the  
evidence that caused the search warrants to be served, but possibly  
not, and certainly not in 1961.  In the case of Houghton, the chain is  
Polish intelligence -> surveillance of people working at that  
establishment -> Houghton handing documents to Lonsdale.  In 1961 the  
last link was enough.

So I don't think there's ever been an espionage conviction where the  
issue has arisen: spies of the 50s and 60s were either caught red- 
handed or were quietly expelled.  We don't know what would happen if a  
spy were to be found purely by surveillance.

ian