Love Story

From the moment he walked into court to defend black-haired Judith Coplon (TIME. March 14) on charges of espionage, it was obvious that Attorney Archibald Palmer would do his best to turn drama into burlesque. In years of trying bankruptcy and miscellaneous claims cases in Manhattan, loudmouthed little Archie Palmer had learned every trick. Last week in Washington, he used them all.

He gauged the temper of mild, white-haired Federal Judge Albert L. Reeves with the eye of a mule trader sizing up a parson; after that he did everything but shoot off firecrackers under the judge's nose. He objected incessantly. He told bad jokes. He brayed, waved his arms, and quoted the Bible with enthusiastic piety. On one of those rare occasions when the judge reproved him, he replied obsequiously, "Beggars mustn't be choosers and I'm happy to get what you're gonna give me ... I subside." Then he would continue as before. As he ranted, he stood close behind U.S. Attorney John M. Kelley Jr.; from time to time Kelley brushed chewed fragments of Palmer's Life Savers from his hair.

Top Secret. The Government's cold and correct prosecutors called a series of cold and correct G-men to the stand to present a damning case. As a Justice Department political analyst, Barnard-educated Judy Coplon had kept her desk loaded with scores of secret documents; she had been trailed by the FBI, been seen keeping clandestine appointments with a Soviet United Nations employee, Valentin A. Gubichev.

Finally, three fictitious but breathless-sounding FBI reports were planted on her desk. When she was arrested with Gubichev, in the shadows of Manhattan's Third Avenue elevated, her purse contained excerpts from the reports, plus 30 FBI "data slips" which pertained to security and suspected espionage agents in the U.S.

One note read in part: "I have not been able to (and don't think I will) get the top secret FBI report which I described to Michael on Soviet . . . intelligence archives . . . When I saw the report I breezed through it rapidly, remember very little. It was about 115 pages in length; summarized first Soviet 'intelligence' activities, including Martens, Lore, Poyntz, Altschuler, Silvermaster, et al."

Defense Attorney Palmer played it as though the Government's attorneys were just straight men in his act. In cross-examining the agent who described Miss Coplon's arrest, he snatched up her handbag, minced up & down before the jury. "Now comes this great eclipse," he bawled, "this marvelous piece of FBI ideology!" When searching her, he said, the FBI had "stripped her from pillar to post" and from "topsail to feet . . ."

Apparently discarding a defense he had used immediately after Judy Coplon's arrest--that she had just been gathering material for a book--he told the jury that she had kept trysts with Gubichev because--"She got an affection for him," he cried. "When you are in love with a person you don't care whether they are red or green. Love knows no bounds."

Giggling Judy. Judy Coplon giggled appreciatively from her chair at the attorney's table--Judy oftentimes seemed to think the trial was just a gag, too. The jurymen--six whites, six Negroes--seemed to spend most of their time in a state of semi-somnolence. Two napped from time to time.

One figure on the defense side did not seem to be entertained by Archie Palmer's low-comedy act. Judy's mother, Mrs. Rebecca Coplon (whose husband had died of a cerebral hemorrhage shortly after their daughter's arrest) sat apart, head bowed, silent. She looked ill, and occasionally she cried and dabbed at her eyes with a wrinkled handkerchief.

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