Courts and bug product

[Nicholas Bohm]

Ian Batten wrote:
> 
> 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?

Yes; see below.

> 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.

Nothing has changed, apart perhaps from more pernickety regime as to 
cautions; but certainly the modern style is to throw huge volumes of 
evidence at everything.

> 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.

As I slightly suspected, we have been a bit at cross-purposes.  I never 
meant to suggest that there are past cases where spies were prosecuted 
on nothing but interception or bugging evidence - sorry, if I implied 
it.  I think interception and bugging were used to catch them and lead 
to "conventional" evidence for use in trials.  I agree we don't know 
what has happened or would now happen in such a case.

But my view remains that spies with diplomatic immunity will be expelled 
where expedient; that anyone (British or not) against whom there is 
solid evidence (of whatever kind) will be prosecuted unless strong 
public interest grounds dictate otherwise (perhaps including 
embarassment to the authorities at one level or another); and that only 
in dodgy cases will foreigners be quietly deported.

(And a last instance that nothing has changed as much as all that, 
albeit fictional:  in one of the "Dance to the Music of Time" series set 
after WWII, the then Labour MP Widmerpool escapes prosecution for dodgy 
dealings because it is not in the public interest to pursue him!)

Nicholas
-- 
Salkyns, Great Canfield, Takeley,
Bishop's Stortford CM22 6SX, UK

Phone  01279 870285    (+44 1279 870285)
Mobile  07715 419728    (+44 7715 419728)

PGP public key ID: 0x899DD7FF.  Fingerprint:
5248 1320 B42E 84FC 1E8B  A9E6 0912 AE66 899D D7FF