Britain Thrown Out

At 119 days from opening argument to final verdict, the espionage trial was the longest in British history. From the viewpoint of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, it was also a disaster. After more than a week of deliberation, a London jury last week acquitted two British servicemen accused of leading a Mediterranean spy operation that supposedly passed British and NATO military secrets to the Soviet Union. A week earlier, the same jury had acquitted five others charged with membership in the same purported ring. Both times, the panel spurned a prosecution case based largely on confessions that were, according to the defense, extracted through threats and psychological torture.

At the center of the spy scandal was information alleged to have leaked between 1982 and 1984 from a top-secret listening post on the island of Cyprus, at the British military base of Akrotiri. The facility has long been a prime target for Soviet spying. British prosecutors claimed that foreign spooks were especially well served by the seven accused, who were said to have passed on more than 1,300 secret documents. Last April authorities filed 31 charges against the group of five low-level British airmen and two soldiers for violating the Official Secrets Act.

In the end, the jury roundly rejected the prosecution's lurid allegations of foreign, presumably KGB, blackmail against the servicemen for taking part in homosexual activity and sex orgies. As it turned out, much of the evidence in the case was, as one prosecutor put it, "contaminated by half-truths and shot through with utter lies." A Cyprus hotel where a sex party was said to have taken place, for example, had not yet been built at the time of the alleged incident. One of the servicemen was in the Falkland Islands when he was said to have been taking part in the Cyprus orgies.

Jurors also questioned the methods apparently used to extract confessions from the defendants. Gwynfor Owen, 22, a Royal Air Force senior aircraftsman, told his parents that he admitted to espionage only after being informed that they too would be arrested. Christopher Payne, 26, another R.A.F. defendant, claimed that he was denied use of the bathroom for twelve hours at a time and made to shave three or four times a day until his face bled. The Thatcher government has promised an independent inquiry into the interrogations. But there was no escaping the conclusion that after many embarrassments over porousness in the British intelligence services, the government failed to demonstrate that the leaks are being plugged.