It Was Love

As the afternoon recess was called, spectators in the Washington courtroom clung to their seats like grim death, eyes riveted on slim, black-haired Judith Coplon. After seven weeks of sitting by, as loud-mouthed little Defense Attorney Archie Palmer contested espionage charges against her, Judy was going to take the stand. She pushed back her chair at the defense table, walked a few feet, and knelt beside her mother, Mrs. Rebecca Coplon, a black-clad, sorrowing woman.

Mrs. Coplon bit her lips, began to twist a handkerchief. From across the room Archie Palmer rasped: "Try to smile, Mrs. Coplon." The old lady immediately burst into tears. Archie, who had a selection of throat lozenges lined up along the jury rail, picked out an orange mint and popped it contentedly into his mouth. Judy held her mother's hands. Judge and jury entered. Said Archie, over the sound of the old lady's sobbing:

"Judy, take the stand."

Head held high, Judy went to the witness box to tell what a terrible mistake the Government had made in thinking that she, a trusted employee in the Justice Department, meant to give a purseful of secret data to Soviet U.N. Employee Valentin Gubichev.

The Female Heart. She spoke clearly and calmly, in a Brooklyn accent. She was not a Communist, not a spy--simply a victim of that Victorian malady, unhappy platonic love. She had first met the Russian, Gubichev, on Labor Day weekend, 1948, in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. They found themselves eyeing the same cubist painting, had begun criticizing it and then had wandered on through the gallery together.

After that Judy saw the Russian six times. He bought her dinners, took hef rowing in Central Park. On Christmas she gave him some Toll House cookies. Said Archie: "Now tell the jury how he impressed your female heart and mind . . ." Judy had found him charming, sensitive. She added, with a quaver, "I thought I was in love with him."

But on the night of January 14, the Russian had demonstrated that he was little more than a foreign cad--he admitted that he was married. He also tried to kiss her, for the first time. Judy had reacted like a milkmaid being pinched by a dry-goods drummer; she had wept and whacked him with a folded newspaper. Nevertheless, on the weekend of her arrest, she came back to New York "to get this thing settled."

Why had the pair dodged surreptitiously all over Manhattan? Judy explained that Gubichev was afraid that his wife had hired detectives to follow them. He had also "petrified" her by muttering that the NKVD might be after him. Judy had thought the whole business was very silly --particularly sitting on different seats in an all-but-empty subway car. She had never dreamed that the car behind was stacked with FBI agents.

Suddenly she and Gubichev were arrested. Asked Archie: ". . . you were taken into a room and stripped?" Yes, said Judy, angrily. One female had held her, and another had taken off her clothes. Had they "pulled the clothes" off her? They had. They had also "probed around" her body and peeked into her mouth. Asked

Archie: "In all your life . . . had you ever been undressed by a strange woman?" Said Judy, firmly, "Never."

Homework. Ostentatiously shocked by all this, Archie turned to the subject of Judy's purse. She readily admitted that she had been carrying notes of a document the FBI had planted on her desk. But she denied that she had been carrying the notes to the Russian.

She said that it was all the fault of her boss, William E. Foley, chief of the Foreign Agents Registration Section. Foley (whom she also accused of being furious at her for taking two hours off to get a permanent) had given her the report, asked her to make notes, insisted that she take them to New York to study over the weekend. As for the rest of the data in her handbag--she was so overworked that she had to take things home.

As Judy stepped down from the stand at week's end, many a spectator wondered how her story would sound under cross examination this week. But none denied that Judy and Archie had put on the brashest old-fashioned courtroom melodrama Washington had seen since the secret document replaced the mortgage as a prop for villains.

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