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...
Britain Thrown Out
An embarrassing spy case
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